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N-Gage to be on 50m handsets by Christmas

So says Ideaworks3D's Tim Closs

N-Gage to be on 50m handsets by Christmas
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Nokia's N-Gage client will be installed on more than 50 million phones by the end of this year, according to Ideaworks3D chief technology officer Tim Closs.

He made the claim in a presentation yesterday at the Develop Mobile conference, and said it was an informed estimate based on Nokia's public figures.

That's actual clients on handsets too - the 50 million figure covers the number of people who've already downloaded the client, plus the number of handsets expected to ship with it preloaded.

Meanwhile, Closs also said that there will be 30 N-Gage games available by the end of this year, and that by December, the N-Gage Software Development Kit (SDK) will support hardware acceleration.

He also did some number-crunching, and estimated that a decent N-Gage game could generate anywhere between 800,000 Euros and five million Euros over the next two years, depending how widely used N-Gage becomes.

Speculation? Yes, but Closs should be well-informed - Ideaworks3D has worked closely with Nokia on N-Gage, as both a games developer and a technology supplier.

"We think it's shaping up to be a pretty fantastic platform," he said at Develop. The point being, of course, that if N-Gage really is this lucrative, we could see publishers putting more resources into making games for it in the coming months and years.

For the full report on Closs' presentation, check out this story on PocketGamer.biz.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)