In the third and final interview in our series of Nokia coverage, which included interviews wtih Nokia's director of games publishing Gregg Sauter and Tomi Huttula, Head of Product Management for N-Gage at Nokia, plus an editorial from Dr Mark Ollila, Director of Technology and Strategy and Head of Games Publishing, Games on Deck talks to Antoine Doumenc, head of SNAP Mobile at Nokia, about SNAP Mobile its potential for game developers, and how it figures into Nokia's N-Gage strategy.
GamesOnDeck: Can you explain what the SNAP Mobile Group is, and what it does, to us?
Antoine Doumenc: "SNAP" stands for Scalable Network Applications Package. SNAP Mobile is Nokia's end-to-end solution for developing connected Java mobile games and creating mobile game-playing communities.
If you are an operator or wireless service provider, SNAP Mobile's full-featured turnkey community packages enable you to create a connected mobile game community, or increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) of your existing community, with little or no up-front costs.
If you are a publisher, SNAP Mobile offers a reliable way to accelerate your entry into the community-based multiplayer Java mobile game market-or extend your presence without worrying about future technological obsolescence.
If you are a developer, SNAP Mobile provides the best support in the industry (tools, documentation, code applets, discussion boards, etc.), which frees you to focus on creating innovative and entertaining games rather than the connected technology.
GOD: What does the new SNAP Mobile platform mean for mobile game developers?
AD: Freedom to do what they do best: design innovative and entertaining games. Because SNAP Mobile takes care of all the connectivity issues, developers can focus on creating a great game-playing experience without having to develop their own middleware or hire a team of system administrators to host the servers.
GOD: And what does the new N-Gage platform mean for mobile game developers?
AD: N-Gage seeks to eliminate or greatly reduce device fragmentation so ideally a developer can develop only one or perhaps a few skus to reach many devices. Our SDK and APIs handle many issues for the developer such as switching from landscape to portrait or dealing with other phone related issues. The C++ environment hides many of the complexities of Symbian and allows developers to easily port code from other platforms. The SDK also has our community features built in so supporting community and multiplayer features is much easier.
