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: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.

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.