I think we should start thinking of a more open replacement.
I personally think that maybe there should be some cooperation on this front to compete with the likes of apple.
An open gaming alliance for example, which spans across Maemo and android devices.
In a perfect world there would be more devices running Maemo but I don't think that will happen any time soon.
The reason why you need an open gaming alliance is to set some standards for portable gaming, standard hardware specs, standard social features etc.
One of the reasons why the iphone has been successful was because the device itself was sort of a standard.
The developers knew what the lowest spec device was going to be.
So the open gaming alliance would set a spec to guide developers.
Hardware wise the n900 has a shot but having something similar to n-gage arena would help in marketing it as a superior gaming device.
The iphone os currently has lots of games available, trying to compete in terms of scale is probably the wrong approach to take.
But there are issues with the current implementation of n-gage, its a very closed approach.. It doesn't take open source into account.
Having an api open and available to developers has its downsides also, its not as simple as making the current one available as that could enable people to break the social aspects of n-gage.
Maybe to avail of social aspects an open source maintainer must register his project with the open gaming alliance, the oga would distribute the games and the social aspects would only be available from games which were obtained from this repo.
I think the concept of n-gage is a good one but it should not be locked in to any one vendor.
There is also other aspects which could be considered like revenue for open source game developers.
Developing open source games is a very different thing than creating open source applications.
There is a lack of great storey driven open source games. Instead of open source games developers moving onto the next project they improve the current one.
This leads to a lack of diversity in terms of genres.
It also leads to a complete lack of commitment in terms of story telling, instead focusing on the hands on experience and thus ending with dull experiences which are not very compelling.
Its all due to the development model, time=money and unlike application development you are unlikely to get any corporate sponsorship when creating an open source game.
There are many ways this could be changed, having a way to donate directly to the maintainer of a game is a great method.
One of the best methods I have spotted in supporting open source games developers is through a sort of ransom.
The way it works is they show what they have and take donations until they reach their quota at which point they make the source available.
This encourages the developers to start new projects and also concentrate on different aspects of the development process like story telling.
They could also sell a game and when they have sold a set number of copies the code is released, this could encourage closed source games developers to start releasing code.
Maybe the games developers who distribute through the oga and choose the ransom method would receive a small grant to get it finished.