Nokia Admits N-Gage Sales Below Expectations 54
Thanks to the UK Financial Times for its article discussing Nokia's first public acknowledgment that the Nokia N-Gage 'mobile game deck' has not performed to expectations. According to the article: "'The sales are in the lower quartile of the bracket we had as our goal,' Jorma Ollila, the Finnish group's chairman and chief executive told the FT.", and it was further noted that "Nokia has set a target of selling 9m of the devices in the first two years, but the company has now corroborated early evidence from game stores that sales have been sluggish." Nokia had previously reported positive results in the short post-launch period, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, but the FT article ends with the Nokia chairman's comments that "the N-Gage had to be given until November 2005 before it could be judged a success or failure."
November 2004? (Score:2, Interesting)
Give it (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this correct? (Score:5, Interesting)
The pricing point in this article can't be correct. I just can't possibly fathom how they would expect people to run screaming into the stores for these things when they're charging this much.
Re:November 2004? (Score:4, Interesting)
Only if they are giving them away with cell phone plans. That thing is too bulky and cumbersome compared with phones of similar (minus gaming) features.
Re:What went wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, the grandparent poster was on a relevant line to this talking about the DRM on the games. They are actually just plain ol' Symbian games that (as unscrupulous crackers have done) can be played on any Symbian phone once you've got them in an unencrypted format.
If that were the case as standard, then you could easily fit several games on one large MMC card and choose between them without even a reset. The fragility of the games is because they have to come on the standard MMC cards, and they just happen to be horribly fragile as a medium.
So its really a fault of whoever designed MMC, and let it become the standard for Symbian generally (which would still be partly Nokia, then, come to think of it).
Re:Give it (Score:5, Interesting)
as now(the current n-gage) it's a pretty damn cheap series60 phone(with more ram than 3650/60 too).
why is it important? because of all the 3rd party software available for series60(irc, opera & etc) that seperates it from a plain gaming device.
they will redesign it of course(who thought they would sell the same design for 2 years??), maybe drop the mp3 chip too(though the mp3 chip is quite handy when you have 128mb+ free for mp3's when you have a 256mb mmc).
sonics 'problem' is that it was not designed for the screen in the first place(screen that's pretty good for shooters actually). the screen with the 'borders' is a screen that's scaled from the 'big' view(you can get unscaled screen on too, by press of a button). in fact most of the games so far have been just cheap ports, and I mean really cheap(the dev costs can't have been that high).
as to providing it for nearly no cost with plans, that's up to the telecoms(besides, such tying is illeagal here as it becomes impossible for the consumer to consider how much is he paying for the phone and how much for the connection, this law didn't hurt adaptation at all btw, if anything it helped it).
anyways.. some sort of gaming is going to be continued to be published for their more powerful phones so they might just as well try to get a bite of that. coding for them is relatively simple anyways.
It deserved to sell badly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Final Comment (Score:4, Interesting)
They won't. Mainly because they can't afford to.
Nokia are shit scared (like every other manufacturer - bar Motorola) that Microsoft are going to muscle into the mobile phone industry and take it over. If that happened, all mobile phone manufacturers would be relegated to producing hardware on flimsy margins and licencing the OS from Microsoft (a la the current PC situation).
The biggest thing that Symbian has in its favour is that the Microsoft Phone OS is truely truely aweful. However it won't be like that forever.
The only problem there. (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, I'd be happier if Nokia had actually put some sort of video processor in the N-Gage which wasn't standard on all other S60 phones.
Re:Give it (Score:3, Interesting)
320*240 is more or less standard, but then cell phones follow different rules, and have different standard dimensions from gaming systems or PDAs. Still, to solve problems like homework you would use the same solution most PDAs use: allow display rotation, or set it up so that most applications run with more vertical space, while most games can run either way, according to the developer's needs. As long as it's comfortable to use as a gaming device in widescreen mode, it'll be fine for most ports. If it can be somehow comfortable to use for gaming in either direction, then it'll just be an added bonus for shooters and such (I find that an interesting note, too, since SquareEnix announced some time ago that they were going to start developing cell phone games, and the first game they announced was a shooter).
Re:It deserved to sell badly. (Score:1, Interesting)
Ever hear of the Abilene Paradox? A group of people can unanimously agree to something that each individual member opposes. It's much easier for a group of people to do something incredibly stupid than it is for one person.