Nokia has said that it will keep its N-Gage store for the time being, even though “Our goal in the medium term is really to converge everything into a single distribution channel,” Marco Argenti, Vice President for Media, told Reuters. The Ovi App Store will sell mass market games, with the N-Gage service being kept separate for hard-core gamers. This makes sense—even if N-Gage wasn’t as successful as Nokia had hoped, it doesn’t want to annoy those customers who are using it, who probably buy high-end handsets and tend to stick with Nokia (NYSE: NOK). If and when it is rolled in it should happen in a way that doesn’t lose customers.

The same attitude is taken towards music: Nokia’s VP of Product Development for Media George Linardos told MocoNews last month: “There’s a long-term vision, where it’s a seamless experience, but at the same time, there’s a case for specific verticals. If you are a heavy music fan you don’t want to go to a general environment…If you were looking for purely Ralph Lauren, you wouldn’t go to the department store, you’d go to the Ralph Lauren flagship store. So, there’s both this need for the Ovi Store to be a vertical for mobile content and also a horizontal to discover other Nokia experiences. For example, if I’m in the music store, and if I’m a Linkin Park fan, and I see all their music, but then I can be offered ringtones, applications and the information on their tours. With the Ovi Store, we integrate the single sign-on to give us the foundation to put together all these disconnected services.”

• @ MWC: Nokia VP Opens Up On How Open The Ovi App Store Will Be
• Nokia’s New Internet Service Brand: Ovi
• N-gage To Launch In November; Games Panel