Nokia’s N-Gage team(the guys behind the ‘gaming’ department of the phone company) have just announced that their service will be delayed. While most analysts immediately went all bonkers, my longterm (and sad Palm OS) experience tells me that they are too late - the jumping should have set in much earlier…read on to find out why.
Essentially, Nokia’s N-Gage platform was an attempt to converge phone, “PDA” and dedicated gaming machine into one package. The gamble involved was that players were willing to accept compromises in terms of game looks(aka CPU power) and usability if they have to carry but one device. So far, so good - but since the original N-Gages were terribly bad from a hardware point of view, they were doomed from the start.
Enter TapWave. This company pulled essentially the same stunt with their Zodiac handheld; a device combining a very powerful handheld with an ergonomical and pretty powerful gaming machine. The hardware scored excellent reviews and was even picked up by retail stores - but the company died nevertheless.
TapWave’s death obviously has had nothing to do with hardware…the achilles heel of the system was the permanent lack of games. No big publisher ever rolled a Zodiac game; indie games(while excellent) never got the media attention that they deserved.
Nokia originally had loads of publishers pushing out big-name games for the N-Gage. However, it remains questionable if these will still push out games for the second generation(after Nokia turned all their code into sewage nonchalantly). Sega had a similar bork-up with the Saturn - if a company as big as the Sega was back then could not keep publishers close by, how can Nokia?
Once the big publishers leave a platform, their ad budgets follow. Journalists and bloggers follow the big boys…and the platform’s downward spin begins. Steve Townsend’s Oval Racer can be a million times better than Jamba’s latest Need For Speed incarnation - the big name will get media(and player) attention.
In the end, Nokia and its partners will definitely make a nice buck from the N-Gage relaunch. However, the current-gen mobile gaming market has already been sliced-an-diced…and Nokia’s latest baby is not on the pastry list….
Images courtesy of WikiPedia. Nokia’s press site did not contain any images of the N-Gage handhelds…
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