N-Gage Endures As First-Party Games Readied

Thanks to GamesAreFun for its round-up of updated news relating to Nokia's N-Gage 'mobile game deck'. According to the piece: "Inconsistent sales in some areas have prompted GameStop to shift their [U.S.-based] N-Gage inventory; while the N-Gage is being pulled from 450 GameStop locations, this inventory will be moved to locations where sales have been stronger for Nokia's unit." However, it seems Nokia "remains positive about their future in the game industry", and Nokia's Ilkka Raiskinen argues: "We are getting invaluable feedback... Our hardware cycles are different to what the games business is used to and our strategy is clearly to have more devices." This has led some to believe more N-Gage-like hardware may debut soon, and in the interim, GameSpy has previews of Ashen and of Operation Shadow, two original, first-party published N-Gage titles.

Comments

Re:Is N-Gage 2/Plus/Pro/Whatever around the corner

[real_smiff]

Well, it seems like a reason not to buy n-gage.

I mean i'm no mobile 'phone expert but i know something about games consoles: rapid replacement turns customers off (i think? or do you like progress?). maybe there aren't enough people buying n-nage 1 for it to matter. 5 year cycles are quite common for games consoles.. for good reasons, such as developers getting to grips with it. this seems like a reason not to try to combine mobile phones with them frankly.. who has a 'phone for 5 years? And if you change the hardware every 2 years, are you ever going to get any good games? I don't know, i'm just a believer in having one device for each job and doing it well.

No thanks

[Winterblink]

From what I'm hearing from people I know who have them, it's a device that tries to be a lot of things and does none of them well. It's actually a very good idea really, given the penchant of vendors now to cram as many devices into a single unit as they can and the obvious consumer acceptance of the practice.

Personally I'm one of those types that will carry around four things if each of them does what they do well. My cell phone's great, I have an iPod for music, and a GBA-sp for gaming. The biggest problem with the n-gage I can see is a total rush to market. Had Nokia actually pulled their crap together and worked on a device that wasn't such a hack job they might have had a worthwhile gadget to buy.