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Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Strong N-Gage Launch Claimed, Figures Disagree 72

Posted by simoniker from the dis-n-gage dept.
Khyl'Dran writes "According to Gamesindustry.biz, "The first official statement from Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia on the launch of its N-Gage game deck has claimed that the device is sold out at many retailers following a 'very positive' consumer response." However, 1UP have posted US sales figures which reveal "...less than 5,000 units of Nokia N-Gage hardware were sold in the United States in the system's first week of release", after reported sales of 500 units in the UK following launch, and 1UP argue a "...rough comparison [point] would be to the Game Boy Advance, which sold 540,000 units in its first week of availability in the United States."
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Strong N-Gage Launch Claimed, Figures Disagree More

Strong N-Gage Launch Claimed, Figures Disagree

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  • I don't mean to flame or anything, but I really can't find that this is news. Horrible control, bad press, there was no way for Nokia to get this thing to sell.
  • wow, i'm so confused that the crap hardware, and terrible execution of the idea led to a lack in hardware sales? someone please explain!

    • Re:*shock!* (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @06:51PM (#7264805) Homepage Journal
      it's not totally crap.

      granted it's not totally awesome handheld gaming system, but that's not all it is.

      but it's a nice 'connectivity device', for staying on irc while you're on move, reading slashdot & etc and the occasional game. i know few people who have bought it, but none who have bought it because of it's games! the reason they have bought it is that it is tha CHEAPEST series60 phone(gb/gbc/c64/spectrumzx emulators, irc, opera & etc make up a lot of it's usability), it's a whole lot cheaper than 3650 and only lacks the camera in utility department(which isn't that vital) has more mem and is more fresh. also it's the cheapest phone that has a mmc slot so it is practical to haul few tens of mbytes of stuff with you(books&etc). anyways, the irc&instant messaging aspect is something of a sleeper still.. once the teens start utilising it instead of sms messages these newer phones will start to fly(granted, these are available on almost any j2me capable phone, but believe me, they're much more usable on series60 phones than on the simpler phones that lack multitasking & etc).

      • so then don't market it as an awesome gaming platform, and more of a sidekick (t-mobile) competitior... if it had better applications than its lack luster gaming design, i would maybe consider it.
  • Just to put this in perspective, that's fewer than 100 per US state. Even Abacus Publishing's Atari ST and Commodore Amiga programming books used to sell more units than this during their first week of release!

    As the article mentions, the Atari Jaguar did almost exactly as well during its first week, and I think the comparison is apt. :-)

  • Of course... (Score:1, Funny)

    by crazysim ( 669230 )
    Many retailers are out of ngages. They were smart enough not to buy it in the first place anyway!

  • Maybe it did sell out... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @06:23PM (#7264534) Journal
    Notice Nokia gave no numbers, so it is possible their initial shipment was very low.

    Odds are, the "coolness" of the device might get some sales from people unaware of the problems, just to result in returns days later.
    • I bought the only one shipped to the store where I got mine, so I guess technically they sold out.

      Knowing that, locally, only the major mobile retail chains are carrying it, plus only one or two major games retailers, if each store only got one then there wouldn't have been more than 200 available for sale in the state. Wandering off on this fantasy, across all of Australia there may well have been fewer than 2,000 available. Sounds easy enough to sell out -- I can't be that unique a person amongst a popu

    • What problems?

      (This line added to avoid lameness fiters.)

      • Problems I have seen with the units, general design flaws:

        1. Having to hold the device on the edge to talk on it. Why? Even holding the backside to your head would have been better. Photos of this can be seen in a review at CNN [cnn.com].

        2. Having to remove the battery to change games? Again, why? They are just little SD like memory cards, put a standard SD slot with the push to sprint our release on an edge of the phone.

        3. The buttons. They feel too much like phone buttons, and not enough like a game consol
        • So, not actual problems then. No crashing or hanging, no battery discharging in 15 minutes, no dead pixels, no failure to connect to service? So people are returning them just because they don't like something about them (most likely the price).

  • Buy and return (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eddnerd ( 624778 )
    I was in EB today. The guy said they have only sold 1 and it came back after 2 days.
  • The real reason is this [video-fenky.com].
  • ...followed by a devastating failure to attract any attention on Slashdot...
  • You know, since people are really against the nGage-- and with good reason, as it's an unplayable piece of garbage-- the easiest, fastest, and most efficient way to get it off the market would be to code up a Game Boy Color emulator for it and release it into the wild with a "(c) 2003 Nokia" line in there somewhere. Nintendo would be all over that in a heartbeat...

    On a completely unrelated note, the phrase "ngage sucks" or some variant has showed up in my page's search string reports more times than I car
  • And I'm sure that a significant portion of those NGages were bought by people who work for video game publications because they kinda had to buy one in order to tell the world how shitty they are.
  • Perhaps they just have really low expencetions
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • you still have to buy games

      Actually, you can get a C64 emulator from here [mbnet.fi] then go to c64.com for whatever game you fancy. Or WildPalm [wildpalm.co.uk] have GB/GBC and Sinclair Spectrum emulators. I bought the former having previously ripped all my GB carts using a Bung Xchanger for the Liberty GB emulator for the PalmOS. I did my remaining GBC carts on the weekend. Or you can download free games (and other software) from my-symbian.com [my-symbian.com] -- It's run all the Series 60 software I've thrown at it so far.

      Nokia would have dow

      • The fact that the N-Gage can run decent emulators and homebrew Series 60 software seems to be the best-kept secret of the launch - I wonder if Nokia completely failed to mention it so they could highlight the N-Gage specific launch titles? I know there was someone posting about this earlier, and I was kinda sceptical that they were even correct, it's been so badly publicized.

        So it's definitely going to be tempting to pick up if it gets cheap enough, considering there's going to be some decent retro emula
    • you can just look at Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories for the Gameboy advance to see that developers for that system have yet to even use a tenth of its potential (the game has shown to be just slightly lower in quality than the PS2 original!!!!)

      Now, I'm as much of a fan of the GBA as anyone, and I too think the N-Gage is a hunk of crap, but let's not go crazy here. Chain of Memories may well be a fine game, but the graphics aren't even in the same universe as the PS2 game; it's a purely sprite based, 2

  • Reflections on the N-Gage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by henben ( 578800 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @07:27PM (#7265178)
    "...less than 5,000 units of Nokia N-Gage hardware were sold in the United States in the system's first week of release", after reported sales of 500 units in the UK following launch

    Flawed though the N-Gage is, these figures don't mean very much. In the UK, cellphones are subsidised by the telecoms companies - it's much cheaper to buy one as part of a monthly contract than to own the hardware outright. People who want an N-Gage will mostly be upgrading from existing contract phones, so damning on the basis of purchase figures is a bit hasty.

    Not that I think the N-Gage is going to be successful - sounds like it's doomed by the portrait screen, awkward cartridge changing and lack of usefulness as a phone. But at 49 quid on some contracts, a lot of people will be tempted to get one as a games console and keep their SIM card in an old handset. (Can you play games and use the Bluetooth without a SIM?)

    I love the idea of Bluetooth multiplayer. If Nokia have screwed it up this time, it's not going to be long before somebody gets it right.

    • Not that I think the N-Gage is going to be successful - sounds like it's doomed by the portrait screen, awkward cartridge changing and lack of usefulness as a phone. But at 49 quid on some contracts, a lot of people will be tempted to get one as a games console and keep their SIM card in an old handset. (Can you play games and use the Bluetooth without a SIM?)

      The awkward cartridge changing is nothing compaired to the fact that there's only one slot. So you can have your MP3 ringtones, heaps of gameboy RO

    • Erm, the phone companies stopped subsidising the phones (to an extent), they hiked the prices up about a year ago. Sure, you might think you can get a phone cheaper than buying it sim free, but it'll come with a hefty monthly tariff.
    • I've seen it at 49 quid (with a 50 quid cash back) in the UK (Phones4U), and most of Europe has it for 1 or less with something like a 25/month one year contract.

      You need a SIM, but you can pick up a PAYG one with very limited credit for around a fiver.
  • The P.A. guys sure called this one [penny-arcade.com]...

    • Re:Obligatory Penny Arcade Link (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The P.A. guys sure called this one...
      They sure did! They along with everyone else on the planet, including CNN [cnn.com], even. Oddly enough CNN managed to be funnier than the PA strip without even trying, but then anyone can be funnier than PA without trying.
    • I read Penny Arcade every day, and find it not only funny but incredibly well drawn. Tycho and Gabe are decent human beings, and I read their Monday-Wednesday-Friday updates on the state of gaming (and the world at large) with interest. I wouldn't consider myself a "fanboy," but I did contribute when they were taking donations.

      PS-- I'm not much of a gamer. I own no consoles and only play Quake III Arena, a 4-year old game. I still find Penny Arcade has a quality factor of about 1.0E99 higher than the [userfriendly.org]
  • .. that Nokia's R&D department didn't notice the glaring flaws that make this an undesirable machine while it was in development.

    They can either scrap it at this point, release a new model that plays the same games, or make their later phones so they can accept the games.

    Frankly, I'd try a version 2 of the phone. It's not an entirely bad idea, but man they should have known better in a lot of places.

  • Well now we know... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Terminal Saint ( 668751 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @08:21PM (#7265715)
    ...just what Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is up to. Looks like the ex-iraqi information minister is working for the nokia PR departemnt.
  • I work at a Target store in WA state. We sell the Nokia N-Gage. Well actually, "sell" isn't the right word. We have them available for sale. Since it's debut, we haven't sold a single one. Only two people have even inquired about them: a 10-year-old kid who was only interested in it for it's .mp3 playback ability, and another kid whose mother didn't want to spend $300 on something that small.

  • $99 N-Gages coming soon (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hirschma ( 187820 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @09:07PM (#7266029)
    I think that everyone here knows the downward trajectory that this item is about to take.

    They'll cut the price in the next few weeks to $199, or offer a rebate to get it to that price. It'll still fail to sell, but they'll wait for the Xmas rush to find that out.

    Since so many gamers spend the Xmas dollars in January, they'll cut it to $99. You'll get it for free with a 1 year contract from Voicestream and Cingular, too.

    By next summer, it'll be $49 from compgeeks.com and other liquidators, and sell out immediately :) Several websites praising this great product that the sweaty masses didn't appreciate will appear, as will several hacks and hardware mods.

    Jonathan
    • side note, voicestream doesn't exist anymore... but t-mobile has done a pretty good job picking up their slack
    • Actually, I bet we see this before the end of the year...

      "Trade in your GameBoy Advance SP and 2 games and get an N*Gage for $99" at your local EB.

      Let's put it this way, you should know you are in big trouble when even before it's released, the video game promo mag (GMR) that is available mainly through stores that are promoting your product heavily (EB), rips your product a new one.

      None of the games got any more than a 6 out of 10, the average rating was 4, and the product itself was rated a 3 out of 10
    • Remember, it's a mobile phone more than it is a games machine. It's more likely to be replaced by incremental upgrades than a GBA is.

    • It's a phone. People get them with new phone contracts (well, many people do - I went for an extremely cheap contract and bought a seperate phone).

      Getting a heavy contract means huge discounts on the phone. I've already seen ads that had the NGage for 0. That's quite common, just means you have an expensive contract for two years.

      For young people who get their phones that way, the NGage may well be pretty tempting. But it's not going to show in the first week sales.

      This is of course from Europe, specifi

  • Will it do better or worse than the Virtual Boy?
    • Well, I bought a virtual boy, and have no intentions of buying an ngage. With how tiny the numbers are on the sales of either of these systems, the fact that I bought one and not the other may actually be considered significant. That's just sad...

      hed.

  • ...it was worse than I orgininally planned it to be. Sonic-N or whatever it's called is just a Sonic Advance ripoff, maybe some differences but not many for the ten minutes I played it. The thing has the worst controls ever, and if you aren't watching where you're playing your hand you're going to start hitting buttons that don't control the game. It's poorly designed, /probably/ hogs batteries although I can't confirm that, and just...ugh.
    • It's a Sonic Advance port, and the battery is great for a mobile phone. I haven't got an N-Gage MMC game for it, so I don't know how much they drain the battery. I played through a few levels of Prince of Persia: Harem Adventures last night and I don't think the meter even went down one notch.
  • Company claims strong consumer acceptance of new product, regardless of what the numbers say. Film at 11.

  • but my chest hurts from my inability to stop laughing at the sheer incompitence of corporate America/Finland when it comes to making a 'cool' product. I think penny arcade got it perfectly right here [penny-arcade.com].

  • Gameboy this, Gameboy that... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:44AM (#7267529)
    The Gameboy has been around longer than most gamers, I can't see why people are always comparing the N-Gage with the Gameboy (Advance SP). All these comparisons seem weak in light of the fact that most retailers simply shun the N-Gage. (Two posters and a binder with a couple pages of infomation is weak comparing to a wall of Gameboy displays, posters, and prop-up displays)
    • The Gameboy has been around longer than most gamers,

      If this were true, the NGage would be in even more trouble. The fact is that the average age of gamers is roughly 5-10 years older than the GameBoy, and most gamers grew up with the GameBoy (I didn't, but then I had a Lynx, and never owned an SNES).

      I can't see why people are always comparing the N-Gage with the Gameboy (Advance SP).

      Probably because the GBA SP is the primary piece of hardware in the handheld gaming market. Simple as that, it's the mai
  • When you only have one for sale, you tend to sell out. Atleast the could be honest about its failure like Sega was or they can take the Nintendo route and forget they ever made it.
  • ok ok ok.

    5,000 units vs 540,000 units. not a fair comparison for a few reasons... 1)Price - not only is the unit itself more expensive, but to get it's full functionality (remember, it is a phone) you have to have add service to a cellular carrier. How many 13 year olds out there have cell phones and/or are going to be able to convince their parents to get them one they can play the latest greatest games on? Few. It's going to take longer for the older, cell toting gamers to catch on. The kids alway
    • Care to pull up figures on how well the Original Game Boy sold during it's debut week? Not 540,000 units.

      There were 100,000 gameboys sold in Japan its debut week. A year later it launched in the US and 250,000 were sold in the first week.

      More than 32 million gameboys were sold in the first 3 years of its life.

      The game boy had a stellar launch.
    • "How many 13 year olds have cell phones?" - Every single one I know does, but I live in Europe, my 6 year old daughter is pushing me for one already, and that's far from unusual...

      The N-Gage is free here in Europe with a one year 25/month contract (what's that 30USD?), that's going to make it look pretty enticing to a lot of people.

      Some of these people will be stuck in existing phone contracts, so take up might be slow at first.
  • I saw an N-Gage display at my local Gamestop store today and couldn't help playing with it. It had two N-Gage devices, which I was able to link together via the built-in Bluetooth (either they didn't come connected, or someone fudged it up).

    There was only a single game installed - some racing game (I guess - I never actually got it past the main menu) called Pandemonium. It had a multiplayer mode, but when I tried to host a multiplayer game on either N-Gage, the game would exit back to the games list.

    I g
  • Nokia yesterday claimed to have sold 400 000 units to date. If so then it blows away the doubters.

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