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."

Re:Premature post-mortem?

[mgs1000]

Actually, Nokia just eliminated [yahoo.com] a bunch of the people working on N-Gage stuff.

They are about to pull the plug on the whole damn thing.

Re:Premature post-mortem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Nokia just eliminated a bunch of the people working on N-Gage stuff.

That article does not say they were elimintated from the N-Gage project specifically.

Nokia Corp., the world's biggest mobile phone maker, said Tuesday it plans to lay off "a few hundred" research and development workers globally, including up to 250 in Finland, in a move to cut costs

Sounds like a good business move to me.

Re:Well duh.

[gl4ss]

they sort of did it. they 'licensed' their own platform, series 60 - and built the system over it. n-gage is a strong machine, not because of games(which have just gotten to good level of playability, actually - even reporters who have always hated ngage before have had to admit that), but because of all the series60 software available for it.

from irc to web browsers to aim to rss readers to python support(can you script your gba with python? DIDN'T THINK SO!).

does nintendo offer a sdk for download for free? no.
does sony offer sdk for psp for normal people? no.

nokia does, symbian may be a bitch of a platform to get into but it's open for everyone to get into, to port emulators, to code games for. you want to write a rss reader in python with c++ components? fine, do it, you're free to do just that.

plus, some of the best games available for it are not 'n-gage' games, they're series60 games.

(..and I doubt it being very expensive for them to produce, as hardware wise it is almost identical to the 3650, with the difference that n-gage has more ram)

Re:Why are you shocked?

[stratjakt]

I don't know what world you were living in where PSX succeeded early. IIRC, it launched with Ridge Racer and Toshinden. It took two years for it to have 34 titles. There was so much competition back then, people just held on to their SNES and Genesis', not knowing whether to bet on PSX, Saturn, Jaguar, 3DO, CD-I, CD32, or wait for N64..

The PSX dragged along with lackluster titles, terrible loading times, and people were ready to write it off until a little something called Final Fantasy VII saved it.

Luckily for sony, 3DO, Saturn, Jaguar and CDI all sucked worse than it did, and they got a good couple years head start on the N64. If Nintendo had N64 ready when PSX launched, I doubt Sony would be where they are today.

A big kick in the nuts was it's port of Mortal Kombat III, which would be arcade-perfect. It was taking a couple minutes to load each round. The SNES started outselling it.