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Next gen N-Gage promises 'super distribution' game sharing

Plans to bring N-Gage and PC gamers together, too

Next gen N-Gage promises 'super distribution' game sharing
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N-Gage owners will be able to share complete games with each other, and choose to unlock them after trying-before-buying, the company's third party publishing boss Gregg Sauter has revealed.

"Everything is on a try and buy basis – there will always be a way for someone to trial a game," said Sauter. "It's super-distribution in that you can send a user a game, they can try it, perhaps send it to a friend, and then that person can buy it."

Sauter explained the system will be very flexible, so, for example, as well as buying full use of a game, an N-Gage owner might download the whole game – say, a 3MB game – but only purchase a licence that will allow 30 minutes play.

"There are different ways for it to happen," he explained. "The easy way that we would like to do it is have the whole game downloaded and give people the chance to try it for a period of time, but then it's already on their phone and you just click buy to open the full thing."

Sauter was talking to UK games trade mag Develop, which in a long interview also teased out some interesting comments about Nokia's ambition to integrate its phone with existing gamer networks.

"We look at this as a very inclusive kind of experience [as well as] an exclusive one – what that means is that we really believe in open-communities," explained Sauter. "We have short and long-term goals and short and long-term road maps. Ultimately, we want to be able to have the user who is in the N-Gage community see, for example, the FIFA community members who may be playing via their PC."

He stressed, however, that the system would be more basic to begin with, expanding as the N-Gage platform matured.

Bookmark our dedicated N-Gage section for more news as we get it.