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

Premature post-mortem?

[Lindsay Lohan]

Sales of the machine and its software have failed to make any impact on the market at all.

I'd heard that a new version of the N-Gage hardware will be introduced before Nov. 2005 - possibly as early as September - although the platform will remain backwards compatible throughout. Although they will admit to slow sales, sounds like Nokia is not quite ready to judge the N-Gage as a success or failure.

I remember the same fatal pronouncements for Windows CE... four years ago.

Then again, N-Gage really could be a dying platform.

Re:Premature post-mortem?

[Doomdark]

That article does not say they were elimintated from the N-Gage project specifically.

Of course not. Why would Nokia give out that specific information? The cuts are announced to please the investors; specifying any more details would have no benefit for the company. But it's pretty obvious where the cuts are done, considering what multimedia products company is involved in, and especially lackluster sales.

Re:Premature post-mortem?

[stonecypher]

i doub that they even don't have

Well said, Bierce, well said. For what it's worth, the Nokia design team for the N-Gage hardware alone was almost 200 people, let alone the seven seperate development teams they had. Hell, their E3 staff was almost a hundred.

actually you're just pulling stuff from your ass

In that respect he's not alone.

of course, if you don't know anything about nokia you could assume so

This from someone which thinks a N-Gage is a 3650 plus ram, and doubts that Nokia maintains what would in the industry be considered a bare bones staff? You sir need to get an altimeter for your horse, before the FAA takes you down as a flight risk.

Mod parent down: his insights don't bear up to facts. Arrogance isn't knowledge, and the grandparent poster did not deserve the attitude he was given, whether or not he was incorrect.

Re:This headline is about 2 years late...

[countach]

Hello? N-gage does full 3D polygon graphics. It runs a brilliant version of Pro-Skater, which is a full 3-D world for your skateboard. You can't run pro-skater on Game boy because it has no 3D graphics, but n-gage runs it brilliantly.

Surprisingly, they sell!

[Humorously_Inept]

Everything I've heard suggests that owners are pretty happy with the phones, despite their varied flaws, and that well over a million have been sold. Looks like people are buying it as a cheap phone instead of a gaming platform, much to Nokia's chagrin (although they'd never say anything like that).

Re:Surprisingly, they sell!

[stonecypher]

Nokia has been lying about their sales the whole time. As of Feb '04 they claimed to have shipped 600,000 units, even though after its first two weeks on the market they claimed 400,000 units, and claimed two weeks later to have doubled that. It seems a year later, a quarter of that sold inventory evaporated.

Of course, you should check the date on that article at The Register - it's Feb 24, '04. In fact, just three weeks earlier they had lied and claimed to pass the million unit mark.

Nobody in the industry was fooled. Unfortunately I can't link you to the speculation which I really want to give you, but the rumor is that Nokia never actually shipped half a million units, and that less than five percent of them have been sold, whereas an unheard of ninety percent have been returned by retailers. To give you a sense of scale, that famously bad Atari 2600 E.T. game which many people claim as the worst game in history not only outshipped and outsold the N-Gage in its entirety, but also had a lower return rate.

Listen harder. There are more hits for the phrase "n-gage sucks" than there were confirmed walmart sales of the device the world over in two years of carrying the monstrosity.

Wasn't designed for games at all

[GoatSucker]

I'm not surprised by this - the N-Gage sucked as a phone that could play games. I got one free, and absolutely hated it. Once of the main problems was that it's hardware and software were identical to a normal Nokia smartphone (e.g Nokia 3650). So once the games got hacked and you could play them on a standard Nokia phone (or even a Siemens phone!), why would anyone use an N-Gage. If it had an extra 3D processor, the idea might have worked...

Personally, I think the best way out the mess is to keep the N-Gage brand as a software only thing, and publish excellent multi-player games for the top range of Nokia phones, to get people to buy a Nokia instead of the competition.

My impression

[aliens]

I got an N-Gage QD when I needed a new phone because after rebates it was $0 with a bluetooth headset. I love it.

I have a great NES Emulator it, great gameboy, AgileChat for IM, PuTTY that actually is workable enough to connect and run some specially made bash scripts, Opera, and some really fun games. I'm addicted to Tony Hawk it's so much like the original on PS1. The only thing that doesn't exist in the QD is Stereo sound :( but I have an iPod.

All in all I think had they not released the original Ngage they would have done much better. That's what you get when you rush product without QA and test groups.

Re:Well duh.

[stonecypher]

(can you script your gba with python? DIDN'T THINK SO!)

Yes, actually, you can. The amateur gameboy community currently runs C, C++, Pascal, Object Pascal, Java, Forth, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Lua and god only knows how many flavors of assembly.

Weren't you just telling someone else not to speak up about things they didn't know shinola about?

does nintendo offer a sdk for download for free? no.

To licensed developers, the SDK has been free since about June of last year, on the heels of the announcements about the DS in order to cause incentives for startups to continue producing software for the legacy platform. Of course, if you'd ever been to WarioWorld.com, you'd know that.

does sony offer sdk for psp for normal people? no.

Isn't this a bit premature? They haven't even released it to two of their three markets, and every single Sony gaming platform in history has had development hardware sold to average Joes, something no other gaming platform producer - including Nokia - can claim.

Re:Well duh.

[Lemmy Caution]

I got it as a phone a while ago. It's a Symbian Series 60 phone for a fraction of the price of others. My expectations of the N-Gage as a gaming device were minimal, to say the least.

But I just picked up Pathways to Glory. It's impressive, an excellent game of considerable depth. Pocket Kingdoms also looks like a first-rate title.

The way I look at it is - I need a phone, don't you? Why not this one? It's not the one gaming platform that everyone should have, but it could be the phone that every gamer should have. Or could have been.

PS. I got the QD. Had no interest in the first one. I've got some dignity.

Re:Well duh.

[mausmalone]

That's all well and good, and theoretically you can do a lot of stuff with a series60 phone and the SDK, but in practice the actual hardware simply isn't strong enough to do what Nokia wanted it to do. If they wanted games to work well on the thing, all they had to do was make a few of them 2D. Also, the vertical screen was a total piece of stupidity (although, a portable DoDonPachi would have been cool). There were other serious design flaws that we all know, too. The grandparent is kinda right that by licensing another platform and then adding the telecom features to it, they may have enjoyed success. The parent is right that the s60 is a great platform. The problem, though, is that the s60 isn't designed for gaming, and that the other portable platforms aren't designed for anything but gaming. For a project this ambitious, Nokia should have (a) designed an entirely new platform that would better suit its needs, (b) do some market research (the numerous obvious major flaws of the first NGage shows that their research and testing was inadequate), (c) waited until the technology matured enough to support their goals.