Ozzy | 3 November 2009

Excellent article, but I think it misses a few things still:
1) The original N-Gage (as in, the daft handset we all remember N-Gage for) had some big flaws in terms of ergonomics and design. Having to take the battery out to change games was not a good design decision, nor the fact that at that early stage in mobile games, the files were too big to be delivered over the air. The whole point of mobile games is that they circumvent boxed retail, except that with this, Nokia decided to reinvent the wheel. Big fail.
2) This was very early in the days of 3D gaming, and when everybody was concentrating on Java games, N-Gage was Symbian-based. That meant that games developers would need to change what they were doing, and take some big financial risks. Sure, Nokia opened its wallet and funded some amazing PS1 ports like Tomb Raider, but at that stage, a decent development budget might have been £50K for a Java game, against the £200K it cost to port Tomb Raider (allegedly)
3) The later, software-only version of N-Gage was just viewed as more fragmentation. Not only that, but publishers didn't want to be seen to be siding too much with Nokia as it could affect their operator deals - and it's the operators that sold the volume games, not Nokia. If Nokia had opened up the N-Gage SDK to everyone and made it cheap to develop for, it might have been different. Ironically, one of the strengths of the iPhone was that it isn't controlled by an operator, meaning it was fair game for developers big and small.

What the N-Gage did do was put a lot of ideas back into the industry; community features, reccomendation and online rankings were all there before Facebook games and iPhone made them the norm.

Henrik | 5 November 2009

Yeah, there were some good games on N-Gage. But it doesn't really matter anymore that N-Gage dies, since the Ovi Store is starting to shape quite nicely and the stability problems are almost completely ironed out now.

There are already lots of games on the store, and in different formats and prices as well. Since the Ovi Store has been launched it seems more are encouraged to actually do native Symbian games again, which is really nice, esspecially considering the newer devices like the 5800, N97 etc.

Nokia has had a difficult year, catching up, consolidating, unifying services and fixing bugs. It seems that it has started to work for them now, so killing off N-Gage (the last of their previous generation services) seems only natural.

rahul | 9 November 2009

If you consider why Iphone is famous & Ngage is not, i would say that apple has 3 versions of Iphone now (Normal,3g & 3gs) , all have same gaming capablities. But with Nokia there are a lot of inconsitencies for instance, no ngage support for N73,N76,N91,N80,5700XM although i do know unofficial Ngage can be downloaded. More so its a shame of biggest magnitude that a high end device like N93 which boasts of 3d graphics accelerator, TV out had no Ngage support. Nokia please not everyone is a fool or can afford to burn cash ( i mean one who has N73 moves to N95 for Ngage, Not many would do that, an Nseries phone is priced equivalent to a netbook's cost mostly). I am not a dedicated gamer, I bought N81 for Ngage but i was very disappointed about the number of games available at Ngage comapred to I phone games. One more thing that would have irritated the hell out of a prospective Ngage game buyer would be the demos, the try & buy is great nokia but where is the point of trying if you can play demos for 20 seconds (Asphalt 3 gameloft it has to gameloft who is capable of this stupidity).A demo is intended to create interest so that eventually he would buy the game but if you are going to play demos for 20 secs to a minute who is going to be stupid to buy a game. There is also a debate whether 3d graphics card should be placed in every phone & since it was not placed Ngage was not popular, i tend to disagree, mobile phones cannot equate a Nvidia graphics monster so it shouldnt matter. the reason why Ngage is dead is because of Nokia only & some assistance from gameloft who just ported its "HD"games to Ngage. Just a request to nokia guys PLEASE DO NOT BRING OUT NGAGE 3.0 BECAUSE ANY BUFFON WOULD HAVE KNOW THE FATE OF NGAGE PRIOR TO A YEAR. RIP NGAGE.