Nokia shutters Vancouver-based N-Gage Design Studio

It's probably a bit premature to sound the death knell for Nokia's current generation of the N-Gage platform, but it certainly doesn't bode well that they've wound down operations at the Vancouver, British Columbia-based studio responsible for many games stretching back to N-Gage's origins. At this point, it could simply mean that Nokia no longer wishes to be tied up in the hard-knock world of game development, admitting that other operations like EA are probably better off fighting that fight -- but ultimately, with the Ovi Store calling into question N-Gage's very reason for being, this could be the beginning of yet another fundamental shift in Espoo's gaming strategy. Time will tell, but in the meantime, there are 100 Nokia staffers up in Canada whose reassignments to other posts remain to be settled.

[Via Joystiq]

[ALBGunner04 Posted Jul 14th 2009 1:30PM]

What Ovi Store needs to do is merge with N-GAGE so we don't have two seperate applications where we can buy games. The problem with some Ovi Store games though is that some might be JAVA games, and lets face it, JAVA games are pure shit. Nokia would need to tell the consumer what kind of file type the game would be, whether it's .jar, .sis, .sisx, or .NGAGE (I think that's the file type N-GAGE games are given)