N-Gage is dead, long live the Ovi Store - full of Symbian games

Nokia plans to shut down the N-Gage platform. It's all going down in September 2010 but the publishing of new games has stopped as we speak. The gaming on Nokia phones will continue evolving under the Ovi Store umbrella.

The website of N-Gage along with the N-Gage Arena community will be left running throughout the whole 2010, while the N-Gage store will continue selling games until September 2010. After that the only place to buy S40 or Symbian S60 games will be the Ovi Store, which will come preinstalled on all upcoming Nokia devices. Nokia also promises to bring similar community options for the apps in the Ovi Store.

Of course, all the N-Gage games you've purchased so far will continue to work long after that.

Well, the N-gage platform delivered some of the best mobile games we've seen for Symbian smartphones and we're quite surprised that Nokia is ditching all the development losing a strong differentiating factor. We'll see how it goes, let's hope it is all for the better.