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."

Well duh.

[AltGrendel]

What they probably should have done is license something that was alreay in the market, like a GBA or something.

I couldn't see how a new platform like this would hit anything other than a small, unsustainable, niche market.

Big News

[onewing]

Over priced phone that has no must own games is not revevant in the hand held market?
Big surprised there, especially with Sony and Nintendo battling for the same market.

This headline is about 2 years late...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's face it, this is the single biggest IT blunder in recent times.

After capturing a large portion of the cellular phone market, Nokia decides to stop developing new phones and build a portable game device - without a 3d chip. Any company trying to break into portable gaming without a 3d chipset, of any kind, is stupid, but a company that would divert resources from its core business, is just plain retarded.

Good job Nokia. You are now a company that makes both phones and games that no one wants.

ngage is a prime example

[Lumpy]

of what not to do.

they had a great idea but half assed it in every way from the beginning.

underpowered and a crappy phone! then come out with a second generation version and piss off the customers you already have.

nope, n-gage was a prime example of the engineers having to bastardize something so the suits were able to get their "price point" instead of a quality product.

Who would have thought...

[Jaidon]

...that a portable costing 400 bucks with games that cost 50 bucks or more and also required one to have a cell contract for probably an additional 50 bucks per month if they wanted online gameplay wouldn't be popular? Not to mention the games were horrible PS1 era ripoffs that were fuzzy and hard to play with the unit's layout.

Just for reference, if you wanted to get the same effect without straining your eyes, wrists, and fingers, try throwing a few hundred dollar bills into a fire while fornicating yourself with a rusty screwdriver. That's pretty much what happened to anyone who bought an N-Gage anyway.

Re:This is all because...

[tktk]

It probably was....

Japan even hated it.

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but the phones in Japan had "N-Gage"-Like machines nearly 5 years ago. They are so far ahead of us on their phones now, the only thing that would "go down like gangbusters" over there right now is a 4 Ghz Intel running XP. Half their phones are already running various OS's with everything you could think of added onto them.

Their market is entirely different and light years ahead of everyone else. What is strange, is none of it makes it way OUT of Japan. We're still ooing and ahhing over the Raz0r phone, when they had that years and years ago. Old news to them. Nothing special.

Re:Well duh.

[countach]

Exactly right. N-gage is a bloody brilliant phone, at a cheap price, that also happens to play some damned addictive games with full 3D graphics. Even without the games, n-gage is the best value phone on the market. But some of these games beat GB-Advance hands down. They may not beat Nintendo-DS, but hey this is a phone. You can actually stick the thing in your pocket.

Re:Store demo's helped to kill this product

[stratjakt]

The game is Pandemonium!

Of course, once you know how to use the device it isn't that bad.

It just costs too much. They charge more for N-Gage games than for GBA games, and most are of a lesser quality. Now it has to face off against PSP and DS.

They need to relabel it as a cell-phone that plays games, and sell it at the Verizon store, not EB or GameStop. If they insist on marketing it as a console, they have to square off against Sony and Nintendo, and will get their balls handed to them.

I actually do hope they pull it out. Competition in the gaming market is good, we need more than one or two handheld platforms.

DEAD BEFORE IT WENT GOLD!

[enigmals1]

The whole N-Gage thing was dead before the product hit the shelves! Especially considering it's size, it's a mediocre compromise of technologies at best.

That thing is basically analogous to a gamer buying a motherboard with everything integrated like a bid'ness PC. Your phone, PDA, and gaming system are all lumped into one...that means so are all the features and upgrade paths. No thank you. I'll stick to separate components if I want a portable game system. Or wait for a palm PC with a nice graphics chipset/card.

Why N-Gage sucks

[Mori Chu]

It tries to be many things and doesn't excel at any of them. People want mobile devices that do things well foremost, and do many things second.

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.

Re:Premature post-mortem?

[gl4ss]

actually you're just pulling stuff from your ass, they're just 250 random people from the multimedia department, nowhere does it say that it's the "ngage team" - i doub that they even don't have a "n-gage" team that big.

ngage is just a little part of the whole symbian effort over at nokia, a byproduct if you will. 3650 with slapped on extra memory.

of course, if you don't know anything about nokia you could assume so.... but then you could be ignorant enough to think that ngages advertising could have pulled them under.

Re:Well duh.

[stonecypher]

But I just picked up Pathways to Glory. It's impressive, an excellent game of considerable depth.

Interesting. That's counter to what I was told, but I'll give it a shot.

Pocket Kingdoms also looks like a first-rate title.

That's because they've got good advertisers. The game is awful.

The way I look at it is - I need a phone, don't you? Why not this one?

Because my phone cost me thirty bucks and didn't tie me into a service contract, meaning that I was able to shop around for good rates; the idea that a free N-Gage is actually free belies a failure to grasp amortized costs. Besides, the controls are a hassle, it's huge, and in my opinion it's hard on the eyes.