Mark Ollila - part two

In part one of our interview with Nokia's Dr. Mark Ollila, conducted at this year's Nordic Game conference, he discussed some of the challenges faced by the mobile gaming industry.

Here, in part two, Ollila joins the debate over whether mobile gaming can match up to PC and console gaming, and reveals more of the new style N-Gage platform.

MobileIndustry.biz: One thing that's sometimes argued by mobile game companies is that mobile gaming has the potential to be bigger than console and PC gaming because there's a much bigger installed base for phones. But the question is, does everyone want to play games on their phones?

Mark Ollila:I think that's a really fascinating challenge that the industry has going forward. If you look at the console generation changeover that's occurred now, we've just hit the first 10 million Xbox 360s, "ii is around 6 million, ps3 maybe around 3 million. Then on the previous generation consoles, there's over 100 million PS2s.

With mobiles, just Nokia itself has around 850 million customers today using our phones. The whole market is huge, so even if the percentage of those users playing games is quite small, the volumes are quite large.

That's why the opportunity is there for publishers and developers to look at. The fact is that people are using these devices for new experiences: music, video, photos... It's something that they take with them, gaming is just a natural component of that that they can enjoy and participate in.

How is your relationship changing with third-party publishers? Previously titles like Sonic the Hedgehog and Tomb Raider appeared on N-Gage - are you still working with the publishers of games like that in the same way?

Earlier this year we had our third-party publisher workshops, one in North America one in Europe. We invited all the usual suspects to come and see our whole new strategy.

During the first half we announced our new additions to our third-party publishers, such as Glu, and we brought in Indiagames to look at that market - so we had those publishers coming in, and we are in negotiation with several other publishers as well.

On the Nokia Games publishing side we've also got a lot of titles that we're looking to bring out. The whole aspect of mobile gaming and working with publishers is that it is a platform which has the capacity to make them money.

That's what they're interested in primarily, and that's what we're looking to deliver. We're trying to bring in this experience which is not only engaging to the consumer but also interesting to the publishers.

How does the level of interest in the new platform compare to the levels of interest in the original handheld platform?

I wouldn't really be able to answer that because I only just joined recently. I wasn't there for the original.

So how would you describe the interest from the publishers in the new platform?

I have to just say that it's positive, fundamentally. They're announcing titles, coming on board with us, they realise the importance of the mobile space, even just through the fact that we've had companies list on the stock market recently.

The fact is that it still generates significant revenue for publishers and it's still growing. If it's generating significant revenue with only about 5 per cent penetration then the opportunity is there for it grow.

We all know that the challenge has been distribution and that people have had bad experiences with mobile in the past. We need to overcome that and understand how you make that experience. Nokia is committed to that; we have to be.