An upsurge in social networking sites and new delivery platform from Nokia has given mobile game publishers a second lease of life after a low key business in 2007.

The mobile gaming market suffered a setback last year, with game developers and analysts accusing telecom operators’ lack of interest in investing in marketing games as the cause. The scenario seems quite different this year with social networking sites themselves volunteering to market the games on their sites. 

Digital Chocolate, one of the few global game publishers, has put its hit game Tower Bloxx on several networking and gaming sites on the Internet. The game was installed more than 400,000 times in just four months on Facebook.

“The take-up has been better than any of our expectations,”said Ilkka Paananen, head of game development at Digital Chocolate. “This year we will support all our key products with similar kind of marketing,” he adds.

Media research firm M:Metrics said the number of people who bought mobile games in the United States and Europe last year was almost static since last year as pre-loaded games are gaining more popularity.

“The mobile games segment has been stuck in a rut for a long time now, with less than 5 percent of subscribers actually buying and playing games,” said Informa analyst Daniel Winterbottom.

Informa expects revenues from mobile games to grow 23 percent this year to $4 billion, helped by Nokia''s N-Gage gaming service which is set to reach market in coming weeks.

N-Gage service will be downloaded on Nokia's multimedia phones, with access to trial versions of many games. All major cell phone game publishers -- including Electronic Arts Inc, Gameloft and Glu Mobile have signed up for the Nokia platform.

One of the key challenges of mobile game publishers is the vast number of cell phone models -- the world's five largest cell phone makers alone bring to market several hundred new models each year. Making different versions of games for a wide range of phones, which all have different software, can make up to half of game publishers costs.

Nokia's N-Gage will allow developers to use the same version of a game to more than 10 million phones.