The upcoming Ovi Store application is due to replace Nokia's existing Download!, MOSH and Software Market services, and there has been speculation about what else it might absorb. However, Nokia has now gone on record to say the N-Gage application will be kept as a separate service, at least for the moment, though they also said that their medium term goal is to "converge everything into a single distribution channel".

But would it be a bad thing for N-Gage to merge with Ovi Store? Maybe not...

In some ways an N-Gage/Ovi Store merger might be a very good idea:

• It would allow Nokia's gaming department to break free of the "N-Gage" brand which has probably harmed them more than helped them.

• Most people that this writer has spoken to still think N-Gage is a dedicated gaming phone, and the old gen N-Gage's reputation was hardly a good one. Moving to a new name would help get across that the new N-Gage platform is nothing to do with the old gen N-Gage phones.
  

• It is a little strange and confusing to have a single company offering two services selling games on the same phones (and separate logins are a pain too).

• With the current N-Gage app, people see a few dozen games in the showroom and some assume that's all the games their phone can run. In fact there are thousands of games compatible with N-Gage phones, but they're scattered across many different platforms: Java J2ME, Symbian S60, Flash Lite and N-Gage. By merging all these platforms into one game shop, people will instantly see a much more comprehensive selection of titles with a much wider range of prices and playing styles. Card games alone would number in the hundreds in a merged shop, which would be a great improvement on the N-Gage's two (!) card games.

Babies & Bathwater

If there was a merger though, it would be important to preserve the N-Gage platform's online community features such as point pickups and multiplayer. The N-Gage platform offers a lot of "sticky" features which would help to make Ovi Store distinctive instead of just another me-too game shop.

Here's what this writer would suggest for how to do a merger:

Make N-Gage an online gaming community system and use Ovi Store as the actual shop. Turn N-Gage into Nokia's own equivalent of Xbox Live, as a method for third party developers to easily and instantly gain a large online userbase. Such an online infrastructure could be opened up to anyone publishing games on Ovi Store, perhaps for free in order to encourage users to stay with the Ovi Store platform. Ovi Store games which used N-Gage as a community system could be marked with a special logo, in much the same way that Microsoft uses the Xbox Live logo on Xbox games which use their Live service.

This would also give Nokia's first party games a new purpose, to show off and promote N-Gage's online gaming features, which would only be available on Ovi Store.