In an unexpected move, Nokia has officially retired its N-Gage gaming platform and will begin moving their downloadable games to their Ovi store.  The N-Gage website and N-Gage Arena community forum will remain operational until September 2010, by which time Nokia hope to have a similar community system running alongside the Ovi Store.

From that point onwards all S40 and Symbian games will be inside the Ovi Store rather than under a separate umbrella, and of course, the Ovi Store will be pre-loaded onto your new Nokia phone.  So although the N-Gage name is being killed off, presumably all the games and if Nokia stay true to their word, the community will continue.  After all, they have a year to sort themselves out.

Although we didn’t expect it, we aren’t surprised by it.  Part of the iTunes App Store’s success (it’s currently the benchmark in terms of mobile application stores after all) is that everything is available under one roof and therefore easy to navigate and usable by everyone, whereas having a separate games store and then another for everything else just isn’t logical; a one-stop-shop will always be the best solution.

Nokia may also wish to distance themselves from the N-Gage brand, as aside from a hardcore network of fans, it doesn’t have the best reputation despite some very impressive games.  Fans of mobile curiosities will recall that N-Gage started life as a hardware series, starting with the Classic and ending with the QD, both of which had their own idiosyncrasies, before mutating into N-Gage 2.0, the download service we have today.  N-Gage Next Gen was fraught with problems right from the start, with its 2005 announcement starting several years of delays before the eventual 2008 public release.

Still, a gaming platform that gave us Hooked On: Creatures of the Deep can’t be all bad, can it!