Vivendi Mobile to sell games via Nokia Download!

Put on your shirt and tie (if you aren't already wearing one) because it's time for a bit of business news. Vivendi Mobile has inked a deal with Nokia to distribute its titles, plus ringtones and wallpapers, directly to customers via Nokia's channels.

These include Nokia's Download! service and the embedded on-phone Nokia Catalogues, which will link to a mobile shop constantly refreshed over the air with Vivendi's latest titles.

Vivendi's games Catalogue is already available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, UK, Ukraine and the US, with roll-out to 25 other countries planned. It offers access to 12 games, which are subdivided into four categories - new releases, top sellers, action/adventure and casual/puzzle.

This news comes on the back of news last year that Vivendi is to support Nokia's new N-Gage platform, a prospect we're eager to find out more about. Vivendi Mobile also recently spread its distribution by getting involved with ad-funded games through Greystripe's GameJump service.

"The challenge in the mobile games value chain is not only to make great games and attract customers, but also in the effective merchandising of games and the ease with which consumers can find, purchase, and download games," said Paul Maglione, president of Vivendi Games Mobile. "Nokia has met this challenge by providing visibility and easy access to great content via Download!. The end result is a new and promising distribution channel that creates further 'impulse buy' opportunities for our titles and also allows customers to enjoy the best mobile games on demand."

Of course, what's significant about the deal is that is underlines the fact that Nokia's push to become a content aggregator is highly attractive to some of the medium-sized mobile publisher like Vivendi Mobile, who have been squeezed out of direct distribution relationships with the mobile operators but who still have high quality and profile games to sell.

Clearly as the world's largest phone manufacturer, and with its own connected software suites becoming a standard feature on its phones, Nokia has the potential to provide access to tens of million of customer eyeballs and wallets in a way few operators outside the ranks of Vodafone, T-Mobile and Verizon can. For example, Download! is shipping on more than 50 Nokia devices, including N-series and E-series devices.