After Apple showed the rest of the world how to create a great device that combine mobile with gaming. The other companies such as Sony Ericsson, Microsoft etc are now taking a new look at mobile gaming. But way before the iPhone became a great mobile gaming device. Nokia dipped their toes into a similar field and it became a big fat failure for them instead. So here is what went wrong with Nokia’s N-Gage(Both 1st and 2nd version)
1) Design failure – Anyone heard of side talking? Nuff said. Plus, the designer who thought of the idea that making people remove the battery in order to remove the game cartridge should be taken out and shot. But that battery idea was fixed in the N-Gage QD
2) Supporting old technology – When the N-Gage was released. It only had MIDP 1.0 support which meant that a lot of cool graphic features were not supported and there was a technical limitation on how good games could look
3) Failing to dump the cartridge system – This is a classic error of just taking whatever works on an existing platform and shoehorning it to a new platform. Nokia should have dumped the cartridge system and just go with downloads via telcos.
4) Lack of standardised hardware – When N-Gage 2.0 came out, it wasn’t a mobile phone anymore, but a game platform. So that means developers have to support different screen sizes, OS versions and other assorted crap issues pertaining to fragmentation. Fragmentation is a bad enough deal as it is in the mobile world and Nokia had to rub salt in the wound with their N-Gage 2.0 platform
So just 4 points from me on why the N-Gage failed. Anyone who has developed for the N-Gage care to chip in their 2 cents?
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I don’t think the cartridge system was the problem (witness popularity of Nintendo & Sony’s mobile games).
The problem for the original N-Gage was that you had to take the back off the machine, then take out the battery! Only once you had reassembled and booted up, could you play the game. Not an easy nor desirable proposition when on the bus.
T
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Good point, Terence. When people think of the N-Gage, it is phone 1st and gaming device 2nd. So while having a cartridge system is good because storage capacity is big. The design of the device where you have to take out the battery in order to remove the cartridge makes the cartridge system cumbersome. Nokia should have stick to OTA downloads and then look at Moore’s law and prepare newer versions for Wifi download.
Point 2 about MIDP makes no sense as N-Gage developers were obliged to write native Symbian games. Which coincidentally explains most of the failure. Why build gaming platform on OS that makes serious performance and developer productivity compromises for memory and battery gains is beyond me.
About issue #3: it’s easy today to consider the use of cartdriges as an “error”, but remember that the original N-Gage came to market in a different era when mobile data connectivity wasn’t as widespread as it is today, same for Wi-Fi connectivity. Full-scale 3G deployment was only starting, and cellular data was alost prohibitively expensive for the average gamer. So while the absence of downloadable games is probably one of the reasons the platform failed, it is not an “error” of Nokia, I would say it is simply due to the product being a bit too early. And Nokia did introduce downloadable games later, when it expanded the N-Gage platform to other phones.
Issue #4 is not a specificity of N-Gage, it is actually the norm in this industry.
Even the Blackberry OS is fragmented, despite its being controlled by the manufacturer. So far the iPhone/iPod touch platform is actually the only platform that resists fragmentation, but it won’t last (the iPad is coming, and Apple will have to change some hardware specs like screen resolutions in new revisions of the iphone)
Hmm, you have a valid point there, tkoo, about Symbian games which were distributed on those N-Gage catridges. Games are the main driver for the N-Gage and Nokia should have made it easier for developers who develop in J2ME to sell games for the N-Gage and supporting MIDP 2.0 would be better as MIDP 2.0 allows more graphical eye candy to be created for J2ME games.
Yup, agreed that bad timing was a point in the failure of the N-Gage. Ironically, if Nokia had released N-Gage as a new and improved device instead of making it as a platform. It may have fared better as wi-fi powered phones were picking up in popularity then.
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