Nokia has decided to shut down its gaming platform N-Gage and will instead merge games with its Ovi Store. This was Nokia’s second attempt at addressing gaming on cellphones after its two dedicated gaming phones – N-Gage and N-Gage QD – failed to deliver volumes.

Unlike the iPhone, which has the largest number of high-end game titles for any handheld device, Nokia has struggled to make the N-Gage platform popular beyond the niche crowd. N-Gage games were specifically designed for a few Nokia phones that had high graphics processing power and the games were of a much better quality than those available for Java. Nokia will now focus entirely on games for the masses that will be available on its Ovi Store.

However, users with N-Gage compatible phones will be able to download N-Gage games till September 2010 though Nokia will not publish any more N-Gage games from now. The handset vendor will ship devices pre-installed with the N-Gage platform for a while (read till stocks last) but it won’t be pre-installed on newer devices.

Typically, on most application stores, games are among the top three categories of popular downloads and things don’t seem to be going good on this front for Nokia, especially a time when the iPhone is taking on dedicated gaming consoles like Sony’s PSP and Nintendos DSi.

You can read the official statement here