Check out the entire 3 page interview over at Games On Deck. Some snippets:
GOD: What do you consider the N-Gage Arena’s competition to be?TH: Our objective is to be the biggest and the most active mobile gaming community. Our strengths lie in the facts that we operate globally, will have a pre-installed community enabled application in devices, have well defined consistent community functionality across games, and are the leader in the richness of existing online features in mobile games. Right now we have 690 000 registered members in 190 countries and 320 carriers. With the next generation N-Gage platform we will have access to a greater number of Nokia devices, instead of two dedicated devices and this will boost our community growth enormously. Although this is a strong set up in itself, we are also looking for ways to co-operate with other gaming communities to support our partners and to maximize the end user experience.
GOD: What lessons would you say Nokia has learned from the previous incarnation of N-Gage Arena for the new Arena?
TH: With the N-Gage Arena we can get really close to our end users which has created a valuable opportunity for us to listen, and serve them better. We have succeeded in building a really personal connection with a lot of our customers. Most of our community activities are hosted events. Some of them are scheduled virtual play dates, where players and our community personas come together to play a certain game and chat in between the game sessions. These events are run by our community personas like "redrum", "congested" and "ikona". In real life they are natural born gamers who really enjoy bringing the social aspect to the platform. The N-Gage Arena is run from our San Francisco office, and I can tell that the work desks there look pretty different from a typical Nokia employee’s desk. Our personas have gathered a loyal fan base and that is really working both ways by getting N-Gage planners and our customers closer to each other.
No new information, but it’s nice to see how hard Nokia is pushing this platform.