Indeed. There's no shortage of success stories in mobile development before Apple or Google came along, but they mostly took place a long way from Silicon Valley.
In 2004, I was working as a graphics artist for a Finnish startup that was in the business of making Java games for phones. The company had started with three founders two years earlier, and when I got there, they employed over 30 people and kept growing. They had struck deals with operators across Europe, and game sales were taking off in a serious way. (Ordinary people were buying millions of units of over-the-air distributed Java software for phones already in 2004 -- but I guess those that were successful in this market were not terribly interested in attracting competitors by making a lot of noise about it.)
The games were good enough that everybody could be proud of the work. On the best phones, the graphics and sound quality was on the level of Amiga or 386+VGA PCs. But more importantly, the games scaled down graciously to the most primitive color-screen phones with resolutions circa 128*80 pixels: thanks to a well-thought out set of APIs, an asset workflow designed for scalability and an extensive database of device capabilities, games could be easily built for dozens of devices.
I ended up leaving that job fairly quickly because I figured out I'd rather be pushing around millions of pixels on the GPU with code, rather than pushing around individual pixels in Photoshop manually. But I know the company was acquired by a large American corporation not long after, and I think the founders ended up very well rewarded for having created that rare combination of technical competence (the APIs and development process), marketing (the relationships with international operators) and artistic integrity (the games looked good and played well).
True, definitely true.
What the difference is, IMHO, that with iPhone and AppStore a single individual can develop something in relatively easy way and have a very good distribution channel. The toolchain is reasonable and Obj-C is fun (well, not fun like python but really funnier than Symbian C++, who tried it know what I mean).
Ovi Store (last time I checked) will not even accept app from individual doing development part-time, without having a company. So, for me and many many other it is a dead game.
Nokia does other very interesting things (N810 and maemo comes to mind) but Ovi store is a no brainer (at least for me). I'm talking as an european that had only Nokia phones in the last 15 years and uses an N95 as main phone (and an iPhone for apps and browsing).
Are you by any chance referring to Universomo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universomo)? One of their architects gave us a lecture on my university's course on software architecture and said that they can deliver games on over 6000 platforms.
In 2004, I was working as a graphics artist for a Finnish startup that was in the business of making Java games for phones. The company had started with three founders two years earlier, and when I got there, they employed over 30 people and kept growing. They had struck deals with operators across Europe, and game sales were taking off in a serious way. (Ordinary people were buying millions of units of over-the-air distributed Java software for phones already in 2004 -- but I guess those that were successful in this market were not terribly interested in attracting competitors by making a lot of noise about it.)
The games were good enough that everybody could be proud of the work. On the best phones, the graphics and sound quality was on the level of Amiga or 386+VGA PCs. But more importantly, the games scaled down graciously to the most primitive color-screen phones with resolutions circa 128*80 pixels: thanks to a well-thought out set of APIs, an asset workflow designed for scalability and an extensive database of device capabilities, games could be easily built for dozens of devices.
I ended up leaving that job fairly quickly because I figured out I'd rather be pushing around millions of pixels on the GPU with code, rather than pushing around individual pixels in Photoshop manually. But I know the company was acquired by a large American corporation not long after, and I think the founders ended up very well rewarded for having created that rare combination of technical competence (the APIs and development process), marketing (the relationships with international operators) and artistic integrity (the games looked good and played well).