Nokia Admits N-Gage Sales Below Expectations

Thanks to the UK Financial Times for its article discussing Nokia's first public acknowledgment that the Nokia N-Gage 'mobile game deck' has not performed to expectations. According to the article: "'The sales are in the lower quartile of the bracket we had as our goal,' Jorma Ollila, the Finnish group's chairman and chief executive told the FT.", and it was further noted that "Nokia has set a target of selling 9m of the devices in the first two years, but the company has now corroborated early evidence from game stores that sales have been sluggish." Nokia had previously reported positive results in the short post-launch period, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, but the FT article ends with the Nokia chairman's comments that "the N-Gage had to be given until November 2005 before it could be judged a success or failure."

Comments

Give it

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it a total redesign. Get rid of the taco shape, make the cartridges easier to swap in and out, drop the price to near free once you sign the phone contract and then maybe it might sell.

Re:Give it

[gl4ss]

if they 'fix' it(the non 'standard' screen), then it will become less desirable for people who do their homework(what is standard anyways? 320*240?)..

as now(the current n-gage) it's a pretty damn cheap series60 phone(with more ram than 3650/60 too).

why is it important? because of all the 3rd party software available for series60(irc, opera & etc) that seperates it from a plain gaming device.

they will redesign it of course(who thought they would sell the same design for 2 years??), maybe drop the mp3 chip too(though the mp3 chip is quite handy when you have 128mb+ free for mp3's when you have a 256mb mmc).

sonics 'problem' is that it was not designed for the screen in the first place(screen that's pretty good for shooters actually). the screen with the 'borders' is a screen that's scaled from the 'big' view(you can get unscaled screen on too, by press of a button). in fact most of the games so far have been just cheap ports, and I mean really cheap(the dev costs can't have been that high).

as to providing it for nearly no cost with plans, that's up to the telecoms(besides, such tying is illeagal here as it becomes impossible for the consumer to consider how much is he paying for the phone and how much for the connection, this law didn't hurt adaptation at all btw, if anything it helped it).

anyways.. some sort of gaming is going to be continued to be published for their more powerful phones so they might just as well try to get a bite of that. coding for them is relatively simple anyways.

Is this correct?

[woohoodonuts]

How can they expect mass appeal whenever they're offering these things for $380? I can go buy a freakin gamecube and a PS2 for less than that, then go sign up for a phone plan and get a phone for free.

The pricing point in this article can't be correct. I just can't possibly fathom how they would expect people to run screaming into the stores for these things when they're charging this much.