Slashdot Mirror
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."
I remember the same fatal pronouncements for Windows CE... four years ago.
Then again, N-Gage really could be a dying platform.
...but "No Longer" suggests they once were.
Trolling is a art,
Shouldn't the title read: N-Gage, Never Relevant
...they took out sidetalking.
I mean, COME ON! That was the best feature!
The N-Gage is not EN-Gaging.
I couldn't see how a new platform like this would hit anything other than a small, unsustainable, niche market.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Netcraft confirms it is not relevant. Meanwhile, on Slashdot, its irrelevancy is featured on the front page.
Irrelevant News for News. Stuff that doesn't matter anymore.
I think this comic from Penny Arcade pretty much sums up how much we all care about N-Gage
What's an N-Gage?
What about the Atari Lynx, please tell me they didn't drop it from the charts!
My brother was telling me about a friend of his that works for GameStop (in the Cleveland, OH area).
Apparently, they were the leading store of N-Gages sold, with 1. It caught some guy's eye as he was walking out of the store, so he decided he'd buy it on a whim. That guy returned it a week later.
So, with one returned unit, that store still had the most N-Gage sales in the Cleveland area.
Let this be a lesson to the "convergence"-crazy companies who are putting blurry cameras, pitiful games, tiny amounts of MP3 storage, and other features into cell phones that don't even make calls well. Give me a GameBoy Advance and a solid cell phone in separate casing any day.
Doesn't the title falsely indicate that the N-Gage was at one time relevant?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
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.
StoneCypher is Full of BS