After 3 years of silence, Nokia wants to return to the video games marketplace with the new N-Gage. As we can read in N-Gage’s blog, Nokia is making a very big effort to relaunch their mobile gaming platform. And not just re-redesigning the platform’s logo. They have signed agreements with companies like CAPCOM, creators of the Street Fighter and Resident Evil sagas among others, to develop games for the future N-Gage platform.
It’s not a secret that N-Gage was one of the most important failures suffered by Nokia. The first version of the console had several problems that had to be solved in a second release named N-Gage QD. With a big sense of opportunity, Nokia wanted to take advantage of it launching a completely redesigned system. N-Gage QD was beauty and compact but unfortunately, the damage was done. After 2 years from the release and with no more than 50 games, the system was discontinued.
Anyway, despite the commercial failure, Nokia sold about 2 million consoles worldwide and learned an important lesson: N-Gage came too early. Why? Well, is not just a single reason but a combination of factors what made N-Gage to fail. At that moment, year 2003, Mobile phone graphical capabilities were quite reduced. No 3D, no spectacular graphics. Even sound features were not so advanced, being a rare feature in mobile phones. And probably the most important problem faced by the platform: it was very expensive. And probably the worst ingredient: lack of games as a consequence of a lack of interest from Game development Companies. With this mixture Nokia had to face a very tough opponent: Nintendo. Nintendo, with 14 years of experience provided by GameBoy system, was the only competitor for Nokia. The result: Landslide victory for Nintendo. Thanks for trying, better luck next time.
Current situation is different. Mobile phones are gaining more and more features. Connectivity is powered by 3G, HSDPA and WiFi networks. Graphical features are more and more advanced. Almost every single phone has multimedia features and lots of them are used as music players. With all this things in mind, Nokia thinks is the proper moment to try again. I think that they should consider a different marketplace for N-Gage, because if they try to compete against Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, they will probably fail again. But, if they focus their product properly in the segment of mobile phone gamers (this sector is growing every day) and are able to sign agreements with the major Game Development Companies like CAPCOM, KONAMI, EA, SQUARE ENIX, SEGA, EIDOS, etc.. N-Gage could be one of the most important success achieved by Nokia. Time will tell.
