N-Gage No Longer Relevant

Spong.com (via Kotaku) has a story discussing a dire portent for the N-Gage. The Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association sales charts will no longer reflect N-Gage sales. From the article: "The N-Gage chart, though still produced, is of little interest to anyone. Sales of the machine and its software have failed to make any impact on the market at all. We still keep sales charted and are available on monthly, quarterly and annual reports, though we have dropped the platform from the ELSPA chart following a lack of interest."

Comments

Re:Premature post-mortem?

[mgs1000]

Actually, Nokia just eliminated a bunch of the people working on N-Gage stuff.

They are about to pull the plug on the whole damn thing.

Re:Well duh.

[gl4ss]

they sort of did it. they 'licensed' their own platform, series 60 - and built the system over it. n-gage is a strong machine, not because of games(which have just gotten to good level of playability, actually - even reporters who have always hated ngage before have had to admit that), but because of all the series60 software available for it.

from irc to web browsers to aim to rss readers to python support(can you script your gba with python? DIDN'T THINK SO!).

does nintendo offer a sdk for download for free? no.
does sony offer sdk for psp for normal people? no.

nokia does, symbian may be a bitch of a platform to get into but it's open for everyone to get into, to port emulators, to code games for. you want to write a rss reader in python with c++ components? fine, do it, you're free to do just that.

plus, some of the best games available for it are not 'n-gage' games, they're series60 games.

(..and I doubt it being very expensive for them to produce, as hardware wise it is almost identical to the 3650, with the difference that n-gage has more ram)