X300 | 30 October 2009

Well...we all have known ealier thant N-gage will loose this battle N-gage vs Iphone, because iphone was much more better with its new games and N-gage 2(2008) games actually downgraded from N-gage 1(2004). So its ok.

Alex Mercer | 30 October 2009

Hell, I didn't even know Nokia had resurrected the NGage to begin with. That's some good marketing there, Nokia!

sidxx | 30 October 2009

What is N-Gage??

adi_pie | 30 October 2009

@X300 N-gage wasn't really in a competition with the iPhone, mainly because one was solely for games and the gaming community around them (N-Gage, N-Gage arena) similar to XBox Live while the other didn't have an official games service, only an app store of which some were games. No one disagrees, though, that the iPod touch/iPhone is the better gaming device.
Though the fact that Nokia is taking the route Apple took is actually good in my view. (i.e. an app store which also has games), but they should make it easier to publish on the Ovi Store, it's a bit too complicated currently.

klouud | 30 October 2009

Nokia did a great job with everything but:

1. PR/Advertising
2. Subsidizing handsets - no hardware sales = no software sales
3. 3rd party support
4. took too long to go from N-Gage 1 to N-Gage 2 thus upsetting the community and everyone jumped ship (to include me! to Apple)

they made the same mistakes that they made back in the QD days. great idea but poor execution.

tim

Kidface | 31 October 2009

I agree with adi_pie and tim. I'm definately getting an Iphone/Ipod-touch,
Plus as well as reviews for Iphone, I always look forward to mobile news and reviews so it's not a complete loss.

Spooky | 1 November 2009

This news was inevitable, Ngage has been on its last legs for ages.
Gameloft and other devs removed all mention of ngage from their websites months ago, sites such as PG seemed to lose interest in reviewing games for the platform a while back, and the games themselves took a massive nosedive in quality.

And why? Largely because ngage was so damn unexciting...
Nokia promised 60+ titles in the first year, but never got close.
The mooted 3d accelerated games never happened.
Gameloft and EA were allowed to port crappy java titles at ridiculously inflated prices.
Ngage failed to support popular handsets like n73.
Sometimes months would pass with no new games.
Zero advertising.
iPhone arrived.

Wasn't all bad though...Cotd was one of the best mobile games i've ever played (iPod included), while Dirk Dagger and MGS showed that innovation wasn't entirely dead on Ngage. Feels like a wasted opportunity now.

kitkat | 2 November 2009

Ngage RIP, it was pretty obvious.
Lack of Stable Platform, terrible dev tools and symbian OS!!! (to develop games???)
Lack of Nokia support and lack of good consumer discovery method...
all this makes a looser, plus no HW acceleration, plus no Touch .... so who is the winner? APPLE of course....

The whole ngage concept was PERFECT in 2004, simply PERFECT and ahead of anyone else in the market, but the poorest of executions in industry have made Nokia burn so much and was deemed to failure. Apple made in 1 year what nokia tried in almost 10.... Focusing on user experience, easy billing and discovery, plus the best dev tools there, was exactly what Nokia didn't have ... a big shame because some games were amazing like Pathway to Glory, fighting game ONE, Creatures of the Deep, ... but ...

If OVI does not differentiate properly the HD games vs. the low quality games (I read lots of bad comments complaining about this already) OVI will fail too and we will all continue buying Apple games and apps and forgetting about OVI and the whole Nokia lot ... let's see if Maemo N900 is able to start improving this....