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Nokia Declares N-Gage A Failure

Posted by Zonk on Fri Nov 25, 2005 02:30 PM
from the not-a-very-good-platform dept.
Portables (Games) Communications
chrisbtoo writes "Nokia's VP of corporate strategy has admitted that the company's ill-fated N-Gage was not the success they'd hoped it would be, and they won't develop the platform further. The device sold 2 million units in 3 years, against projections of 6 million. They'll continue to build the gaming software into their Series 60 phones, but gaming won't be a priority for them until 2007." From the article: "The company launched the N-Gage in 2003 but sales have been disappointing and, according to the company's roadmap, mobile gaming will not be a focus until 2007. Nokia is concentrating on mobile music for the rest of this year, and next year's main push will be on driving mobile television."
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[+] The N-Gage Will Rise Again 79 comments
The New York Times has an article up this week talking about Nokia's third attempt to get their N-Gage brand into the minds of gamers. This time it's a service, not a device, and the company is betting that branding mobile games will be a better tactic than their previous attempts. "The Ideo and Nokia executives concluded that users mainly want to play against their friends and, at the very least, they want to know the skill level of their opponents. As a result, the new N-Gage permits users to see what games their friends have on their phones and whether they are online. They can also see how many points a person has earned in the game, as well as how much time they devote to solitary play versus group play. The researchers also asked players what their greatest frustrations were. High on the list was buying a game that turned out to be disappointing. In the new N-Gage service, customers will be able to sample games free before buying them. The selection will lean toward the casual side of gaming, with soccer and fishing titles and the popular puzzle game Bejeweled, among others. Nokia has not yet discussed prices."
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  • Wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by gcnaddict (841664) <gcnaddict @ g m a il.com> on Friday November 25 2005, @02:32PM (#14114346)
    NGage a failure? What a surprise *rolls eyes*

    seriously though. It wouldnt have worked even if they tried. No game system is ever supposed to have a screen taller than it is wide, especially in first person shooters. no one's going to snipe you from the top. theyll all use a chainsaw on you from the side!

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No game system is ever supposed to have a screen taller than it is wide

      Ah those kids today, too old to have enjoyed Tempest, Centipede, Galaga...Pac-Man...

  • Not worth the hype (Score:4, Insightful)

    by unik (929502) <jezzah@gmail.com> on Friday November 25 2005, @02:32PM (#14114347)
    I think the problem was a combination of bad timing and over-hype. With the PSP lurking, it just couldn't compare.
  • if we're experiencing a "mobile bubble" similar to the dot com?
    • So "they" think. Personally, I could give a rats ass about built in camara, FM radio, MP3 player, TV, video games... I just want a phone with clear reception and the audio to not be compressed to hell. I've hear ham radio sound better.

      Bubble my ass.

    • Re:Am I the first to wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Iriel (810009) on Friday November 25 2005, @03:19PM (#14114581) Homepage
      I think it was a bubble about as big as a cell phone actually ;) Yeah, music/gaming on your phone could be neat and all, and maybe plenty of people think it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. But nokia just 'reported' that it failed: we needed them to actually tell us this? I think the N-Gage is the perfect example of what happens when you try to cram too much into a device that already needs to be a phone, which is no meager task.

      Advanced technology be damned I tell you! (sarcasm here, people) but I still get plenty of dropped calls and basic connection failures. I think the size of phones sort of limits them to being good at being a phone and about one other task. With the possible exception of a PDA though, I don't think I've seen any multi-function phone that does a secondary task well enough to make someone stop using their dedicated camera/music player/game device.

      Spy der Mann hit it almost squarely on the head with this. People have been stretching themselves too thin in some attempt to add widgets to your cell phone because we all love everything to be portable, and most of us already have cell phones to begin with. The only problem here is that there wasn't any lack of product, but rather the quality of the products have been crippled in many (but not all) cases by limitations of the hardware.
    • You might wonder that, but you'd be wrong. Mobile gaming is HUGELY popular and as the devices get more and more capable, 3D graphics is becoming main stream and viable, revenues are sky-rocketing, the future is looking brighter than ever for mobile gaming!

      You can find tons of stuff about it with a bit of Googling, but here's some reading to get you started:

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/09/mobile_gam ing_analysis/ [theregister.co.uk]

      Peppe

      • Google? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by LWATCDR (28044)
        With all that dark fiber they own + WiFiMax I could see a Google branded mobile phone. VoIP. Streaming video, and goodness know what else.
        Why? Location based ads. Google Local for you cell is already available but just imagine the ad dollars. What someplace to eat? Click and call baby.
  • They sold 2 million units more than they really should have;-)
    • Hey, it was pretty cheap and had OK features for a Series60 phone - if you ignored the games. Lots of good symbian apps made it pretty useful phone for the price - at least in countries where you don't pay for your phone by agreeing into ripoff contracts and instead actually pay the whole price of the phone (and have substantially cheaper calls as a benefit).

      Now today it's getting obsolete fast, and this announcement basically spells it out - there won't be a new-but-compatible respin of N-Gage, and instead
  • You were a little slow on the ball there, good luck next time :D

  • obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by munehiro (63206) * on Friday November 25 2005, @02:36PM (#14114363) Journal
    The best innovation in human usability

    http://www.sidetalkin.com/ [sidetalkin.com]

    i guess it's not completely unrelated to the bad results of this cellphone

  • Takes Guts (Score:4, Interesting)

    by prichardson (603676) on Friday November 25 2005, @02:37PM (#14114365) Journal
    I think it shows a lot that they were able to do that. In a corporate environment mistakes are simply not allowed, and so lots of failures get beat to death repeatedly, costing the company a lot of money in development and a lot of consumer credibility. To be able to admit that their product was a mistake and move on will do them a lot of good in the long term, even if they suffer in the market a little.

  • Nokia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RichiP (18379) on Friday November 25 2005, @02:39PM (#14114376) Homepage
    Nokia's problem is that they keep developing stuff in-house without seeming to gather feedback or comments from their market. They really should just host a site where users can post feature requests or comments for their next products. I've seen the N-Gage and while I think it's possible to come up with a gaming platform/cellphone, they didn't do it well.

    • Re:Nokia (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Minwee (522556) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Friday November 25 2005, @03:43PM (#14114690) Homepage
      You're right about that, but the other biggest problem is that some developers spend too much time listening to the random, unfocused rantings of the general public, and end up trying to make devices which are soft and cuddly but with lots of firepower, telescopes, microscopes, and periscopes that never stop dancing.

      The only way to win is to walk a middle path between having a coherent vision for the product and having an idea of what your customers want.

      To pull examples from the movies, "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" and "Gigli" were examples of films created entirely from the top down without any concern for what the viewers wanted while "Catwoman" and "Showgirls" spent so much time giving the audience what they thought they wanted that there wasn't much room for anything but sucking.

      The biggest problem is that while a room full of engineers and a table covered with marketing reports is no substitute for one brilliant designer, that doesn't mean that the one brilliant designer can't use a little guidance in what people want.

  • It sucks (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 4D6963 (933028)
    Not surprising : cell phone games suck. I downloaded packages on P2P with hundreds of Java games for my Nokia 3200, and hardly can find any that's good, they all use tired concepts, they just plainly lack interest. A few years ago it was said that cell phone games would soon be as good GameBoy games, but that's bullshit, none of all the java games I tried is as good as some old arcade gamles from the mid 70's that i play with MAME, you'll have much more fun playing Arkanoid or Space Wars than playing Tomb
    • You're surely aware that the N-Gage was/is a Series60 phone? Running a Symbian OS? With applications and games written in C++ instead of Java? That's not to say the games wouldn't suck, but Series60 as a platform offers more features than J2ME.
    • The N-Gage doesn't play basic 64k Java games like the Series 40 phones do, you know. Its hardware is more powerful than the GBA.

      I still think that if they had skipped the sidetalking version and just released the QD as the first N-Gage, even if it delayed them a couple of months, and if they had marketed it better... oh, and had not allowed the Tomb Raider port to be ruined by an incredibly stupid control scheme...

      Oh well.

  • it was not going to be a success, after having seen what I once saw:

    A poor devil speaking through one of those.

    He had to hold it sideways! (long edge of the phone facing his ear).

  • Nokia Declares Mobile Television A Failure (Score:5, Funny)

    by awch (134042) on Friday November 25 2005, @02:43PM (#14114396)
    Nokia is concentrating on mobile music for the rest of this year, and next year's main push will be on driving mobile television."
    ...to be followed by the 2007 Slashdot article titled, "Nokia Declares Mobile Television A Failure."

  • who wants tv on their phone? seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dcstimm (556797) on Friday November 25 2005, @02:44PM (#14114401) Homepage
    Not only does the quality suck, it uses your call time and its will drain your battery like no other.

    Plus I am getting so tired of the commericals for video on the phone that splice High quality video on the screen of the phone so it doesnt look like shit.

    Nokia, I could have told you the N-gage would have been a flop the second you released it.

    People seem to think if something has good marketing then it will be popular. Not true at all!

    • hey hey hey there they have a 2px caption at the bottom that clearly states "simulated screen only" what more do you want from their advertisement? upfront honestly? Yeah next you'll want products engineered with the customer in mind!!!

      Stupid hippies...

      Personally I don't see the appeal of it. Not like you can really watch TV while walking around downtown ... and expect to survive. On the bus/train it's too noisy [and honestly you don't always get a seat] and on airplanes they tell you to shut it off cuz it could "send the plane up the bomb!"

      Well that and watching TV on a 1" screen is just pathetic. At least airplanes have 5" [or so] screens in the back of the head rest thingy...

      Tom
      • Personally I don't see the appeal of it. Not like you can really watch TV while walking around downtown ... and expect to survive. On the bus/train it's too noisy [and honestly you don't always get a seat] and on airplanes they tell you to shut it off cuz it could "send the plane up the bomb!"

        I heard they have invented headphones quite a long time ago...

  • Frustrating (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LaughingCoder (914424) on Friday November 25 2005, @02:45PM (#14114408)
    At the time the NGage came out I was doing mobile development (cell phone music downloads). We begged Nokia to build a decent music phone. All we wanted was 16 bit 44KHz stereo audio and room for an SD/MMC card -- nothing exotic. All of their phones, even the Symbian "open OS" phones, were handicapped with mono 16KHz audio which basically stinks for music. Actually, some had 8KHz mono.

    When I first saw the NGage I couldn't contain my laughter ... and to hear high level officials of Nokia pronounce that they "would own the portable gaming space" was beyond funny. Any game machine you have to shut off and take apart to change games was not designed by people with a clue. Anyhow, I couldn't help but notice that *NOW* they are going to concentrate on music phones. Unfortunately for them, that horse has already left the barn. They had a golden opportunity, but blew it.
    • *NOW* they are going to concentrate on music phones. Unfortunately for them, that horse has already left the barn.

      And look how well Motorola did with the ROKR. Let's hope that Nokia's smart enough to keep an eye on that product before rolling out their own clone-of-failure.

        • From the point of view of the cell phone companies, you just designed the worst phone ever. No connector conspiracy? What are you thinking? Loading (possibly pirated) music from the computer without paying $2 for each one? Prepostrous! No DRM? What, do you want to be sued?

          Sure it would be a great phone, but no service provider would carry it because they are far more interested in new ways to pull money out of your wallet than installing features you're actually asking for.

          On the other hand, the

  • Cheap Symbian (Score:4, Insightful)

    by donutface (847957) on Friday November 25 2005, @02:48PM (#14114421)
    I have an ngage, and I love it. Granted the games are shocking, but its the cheapest Symbian phone on the market, and a very good one at that. Cheapest colour bluetooth nokia too when I bought mine. Might be a failure for games, but its still a hell of a good and cheap symbian phone!
  • Also probably a couple of years too early, given the non-gaming-specific hardware that mobile phones use. The fun that is playing a game on an old Gameboy, never mind a Gameboy advance or DS, is down to the hardware that makes it possible - the tiled graphics modes on the old Gameboy meant faster games, for example, than the ol' 4MHz Z80 could do on its own.

    If the nGage had come with, say, 10-20 games built-in, where each game was an implementation of a classic game - space invaders, arkanoid, asteroids, pa
  • Nokia is concentrating on mobile music for the rest of this year
    Yeah right! When I looked for a phone that could play MP3s a year ago, only one of the dozends of models from Nokia was able to do it in stereo. By conincidence it was the N-Gage classic, which is almost unusable as a phone (short standby times and silly sidetalking).
  • ... no wonder it was a failure (I am talking about the first generation n-gage here). As far as I know, you had to turn the thing off to change the games, and the thing must have come with a 170 page manual just to change it. Plus, you looked like you had been a victim of a frisbee accident. Gee, I love to see a house built by the n-gage engineers. It would probably contain a kitchen and a living room seperated by a two door bathroom or something like that. :)

  • A complete and utter waste of time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Y-Crate (540566) on Friday November 25 2005, @03:00PM (#14114489)
    With every not-so-great (in my opinion, anyway) gadget, there is always that sliver lining. That one thing that makes you go "At least they tried...it's not so bad, really".

    I never had that moment with the N-Gage. Every single aspect of its design seemed to be engineered to piss off the end user and make them throw it across the room in an unspeakable rage.

    The screen's aspect ratio was 180 degrees off, the device had to be disassembled to change games, it tried to be the Swiss Army Knife of phones and failed miserably at it...the brutally awful sidetalking "feature" along with the painfully awkward keypad made it something that not even the overpowering hype could render a somewhat decent product in the minds of potential customers.

    Most people I encountered wouldn't even use one if they got it for free. Until the PSP came out, there was nothing for gamers who found that the GBA/DS did not offer the kind of game library they were after. They blew a perfect chance, and no amount of hardware revising could correct the fatally undermined confidence that the public had in the entire platform.
  • is when you look at it you are wondering ok is this a phone thats also a game system or a game system thats also a phone? cell phone companies have failed to recognize that consumers don't want multipurpose devices. They want individual devices that do one thing really really well. Thats why the ROKR is crap and the iPod is boss. Thats why the NGage is crap and the PSP(or Nintendo DS) is king.
  • They were quite shitty gaming consoles but more than adequate series 60 smartphones for the price.

    And for chrissakes, before you start posting any sidetalking-jokes try to remember that those models havent been made for ages now.
    • They were quite shitty gaming consoles but more than adequate series 60 smartphones for the price.

      And they probably sold better than similarly designed adequate-to-decent phones would have... for the price. But is a decent but unconventional phone going to sell the 6 million units Nokia was looking for? How well would something designed to be a good phone first, with the same gaming capabilities, have sold?
  • The really depressing part about this headline is that it probably took eight or nine senior market analysts a full quarter's worth of work to figure this out, and all they had to do was Ask Slashdot (tm). Ah well; guess they have to make their Christmas bonuses somehow.

  • HO Gauge is clearly superior. (Score:5, Funny)

    by ScentCone (795499) on Friday November 25 2005, @03:18PM (#14114574)
    Much more pulling power, anyway, and the little fake trees scale better.
  • You really do have to admit, when it comes to the portable gaming market, Nintendo is king and will do anything it takes to protect their market space. Now, yes, the PSP has made *some* headway against big N. But, when you look at the sophistication of the PSP's hardware combined with the Sony name, it just shows how strong Nintendo's hand is when Sony only has captured a small portion of the market.

    Nokia also made the mistake of not understanding that if people are buying a machine for portable gami

  • Mobile TV (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dnaumov (453672) on Friday November 25 2005, @03:21PM (#14114593)
    Before any of you dismiss it with a "who wants to watch TV on their phone", you should give it a try at your local mobile phone reseller, you will be surprised. I purchased a Nokia 6630 [nokia.co.uk] and you should've seen the jaws of my co-workers when I showed them the latest TV news being streamed to my phone over a 3G connection. The 6630 can play fullscreen 16:9 video and has 16 bit 44Hz stereo sound. On a related note, the was recently a poll in Finland (which is where I live), asking people if they would be interested in watching TV on their phone. Slightly [b]over 60%[/b] answered YES.
  • So why not team with Nintendo and make their phones play Ninento games?
  • hmm, wonder if their new 770 [nokia.com] linux based [maemo.org] tablet will suffer the same fate?
    It was finally released in europe & US last week and there has been a rush. New stock due in next week

  • The N-Gage: A gaming device loathed by gamers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Andrew Lenahan (912846) on Friday November 25 2005, @03:52PM (#14114744) Homepage
    A full analysis of "what went wrong" with the N-Gage could easily fill a book, and perhaps it will someday. There were certainly design issues aplenty, especially with the original device.

    But more than anything, I think Nokia's major mistake was lack of understanding, perhaps not lack of understanding of gaming as a market or a business or a segment or consumer base, but of actual gamers themselves. I'm sure they must have done some sort of market research, but it apparently was focused more on cel-phone fans and mobile-gadgeteers ("What cool features would you like in a phone?") than on gamers ("what makes a good mobile gaming experience?").

    They did market to gamers, or at least a merketing-executive's vision of what a gamer might be like, but it seemed woefully misdirected: one early print ad featured a 1993-style gen-x grunge rocker dude, playing his N-Gage in a totally X-treme manner while atop a skateboard.

    The launch titles included some of the hottest game licenses... of the original Playstation of the mid 1990s. Tomb Raider, probably the one game most closely associated with the N-Gage, hadn't been a hot property for years before her N-Gage debut. Once again, the N-Gage seemed drastically out of touch.

    The result? At launch, the N-Gage was already (among gamers at least) not much more than a punchline. A Penny Arcade strip from around the launch parodied the launch event at a local game store (nobody came except two employees) and online forums were merciless in blasting the device. It's now three years later, the design has been vastly improved and a few decent games have trickled out, but the N-Gage has never really been more than the butt of jokes. Those who do own one tend to get defencive about it, (it's not my fault, my gran bought it by mistake, etc.) as though having N-Gage is like having some horrible disease. It's been struggling since it came out, and the competition has only increased, with the DS and PSP now vying for more of the marketplace.

    But the industry rarely seems to learn its own lessons, no matter how hard they come. Tapwave's Zodiac is already dead, and the Gizmondo seems near certain to follow. How many more millions need to be wasted before someone gets it: before you release a gaming device, understand gamers!

  • How/why did the execs approve this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DroopyStonx (683090) on Friday November 25 2005, @08:37PM (#14116114)
    First question they should've thought about was: Why would/should consumers choose us?

    1. Are our games fun?
    2. Is our technology up to speed for today's standards?
    3. Are our games logically affordable?
    4. Is the unit innovative, easy for someone to use as a gaming system and cell phone while keeping in mind portability?

    Answer to all of those is a resounding no. The system was horrible. Compared to what already existed, the graphics sucked and the games sucked. It was like taking a giant step backwards in the gaming industry. So who within the company honestly thought such a thing would be a good idea?

    Granted game development and being "fun" is left up to the 3rd party developers, but even in taking on a project, "Hey, Nokia wants us to create a game for their new system"... one should think, "We better make this game damn good or we're screwed."

    Releasing something less than amazing on a non-popular system is suicide.

    I realize that sometimes success is based off of taking risks, but that also assumes the heads in charge know how to use logic. You can't just take a stab in the dark and expect to hit gold.
    • So, you mean that if there was a new GBA, 100% compatible with the others, but also with basic cell phone functions, it would automatically suck for games - even if they played exactly like in the other GBAs?

      Weird logic...

        • While you are correct about the form factor thing it wouldn't be hard to imagin a future DS with a bluetooth or even just a wired microphone/earpiece adaptor. Plus the touchscreen could easily have a numpad displayed on it.
        • A DS, however (Touchscreen) may have an advantage here. Release one with a wireless headset and a Skype interface (WiFi, remember?) and there may be a winner.
    • No, they plan to start failing again in 2007. It'll be another 4 years (and millions of dollars) or so before they admit to having failed again.

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