RSSNokia's N-Gage can't survive against iPhone, will be shut down
By Tim Conneally | Published October 30, 2009, 2:36 PM
According to Reuters today, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia will reportedly be shutting down its N-Gage gaming service. The shutdown will come six years after the mobile phone and gaming system hybrid concept debuted and was quickly retired; and nearly four years after it was re-invented as a part of Nokia's smartphone ecosystem, and later integrated with the Ovi platform.
Nokia intends to stop publishing new N-Gage titles and eventually wind down the service by the end of next year. Games will still be a major part of the Ovi platform, available in the Ovi Store under store.ovi.com/games, but the dedicated N-Gage brand is finally being scuttled.
In the N-Gage blog today, the Nokia Games Team tried to explain the reasoning behind the service's closure.
"As mobile gaming evolves and begins to encompass social gaming, we want to offer one store front with an even broader portfolio of games -- games for everyone. It's much more convenient to have one place to get all your mobile games, and this it what Ovi Store provides. Mobile gaming is one of the most popular activities in the Ovi Store, with games being the #2 most downloaded category for premium content," today's blog entry said.
The problem was that the re-designed N-Gage was marketed as a niche product to serious gamers who owned Symbian S60 devices. But after the early failures of the platform (namely its high cost, weak game support, and poorly designed "game deck") the product had little or no appeal to the very niche it was trying to serve.
This failure, coupled with the app store gold rush occurring on all the major smartphone platforms, especially iPhone and iPod Touch, could help de-fragment Nokia's games offerings and help reach a wider audience.
The only thing that is truly going to suffer from this change is the community element associated with the N-Gage Arena, which lets users post high scores, write reviews, and manage their games. After the N-Gage shutdown, games will continue to work, but all the community features in the games will stop functioning after 2010.
the more I think about this article headline the more I too think - "what has the iphone got to do with anything"?
Maybe one day mobile gaming will take off on phone handsets, but the iphone, palm pre, symbian, gizmondo, winMobile device just isn't there yet.
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|What did the iPhone have to do with this? The N-Gage was a failure almost immediately upon being released, well before the iPhone existed. It simply wasn't well designed and never took off.
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|Nokia's N-Gage never stood even a remote chance against any portable gaming device.
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|It wasn't that n-Gage couldn't compete against the iPhone - it would have failed even if Apple had never gotten into the phone business. It was not well supported and the hardware just wasn't ready for it yet. In other words, typical Nokia. The company makes solid, reliable hardware and has the sense to put a highly usable OS on their devices..but they are clueless about leveraging that ecosystem. Symbian has never been that easy to work with thanks to unnecessary fragmenting of the OS, and the carriers make it even harder by locking out most of the better apps. At this point I'd be surprised if we get a new Symbian smartphone on an American carrier - the last two have been huge disappointments. In fact, I'll be surprised if we ever get another decent Nokia smartphone in North America. The economy here isn't turning around any time soon thanks to the madmen in Washington and Nokia seems to have no idea how to market a competitive, desirable device anyway.
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|that is NOT a suprise. the Nokia phones I've used and owned have been good phones, but awful gaming machines. they're just not games machine, they're not designed to be - they're phones.
N-Gage was trying to shoehorn a gaming platform onto hardware that wasn't designed for it.
Iphone games though.. jees, another platform NOT designed for games. marginally better than nokia in that the "buttons" and "d-pad" can be anywhere, but c'mon it's not a games machine either, no matter how you look at it, games on iPhone/iPod touch don't work that well with the touch screen and even less well with accelerometer.
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|Um... N-Gage closes down, Nintendo has problems and the iPhone / iPod Touch have nothing to do with it?
This is a brand-new platform, but people are already buying those devices specifically for the games and the major developers are moving investment in a big way...
And the touch screen/accelerometer is actually supporting innovation and creativity, which is demonstrated with the 'draw' games that are hugely successful... and not a D-pad in sight.
At home we are playing Doom (fantastic control from the touchscreen interface), Real Racing (accelerometer beats any D-pad for steering) and Scrabble (even tho we got the original board game) all the time, and are now no longer considering the Wii...
iPhone and iPod Touch as games machines are already a major force (50m + installed base) and are here to stay... especially as Sony and Nintendo have not got their act together (yet).
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|Yes, Doom Resurrection and Real Racing show off the iPhone OS platform. Galaxy on Fire is a decent example also.
N-Gage never had a chance, though. It wasn't much of a game machine and it was embarrassing to use as a phone.
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