New writer Chris Rydberg takes a look at the N-Gage in 2003, from announcement to the Christmas sales, and everything in between. Does the N-Gage's checkered past equal a short-lived or non-existent future?
Everything Old is New?
Well Nokia still seem to be backing the existing N-Gage in this press release they are about to launch a N-Gage promotion around the Ski resorts of Europe next week.
"The N-Gage Snow Tour kicks off in Hermagor, Austria on February 13, 2004 and will visit more than 27 winter sport resorts in 7 European countries, letting gamers sample the latest N-Gage releases and mobile gaming at its best."
"Realizing that the video game market was no push over they dropped the price almost immediately in the US by 100 USD and added the "choose 3 free games" option through many retailers. Though this helped they only managed to ship some 400,000 units by year's end selling by some estimates as few as 200,000. The less popular titles like THQ Wireless' MLB Slam! managed as few as 153 sales through the whole of the Christmas season of 2003."
Nokia will wind up sending more than 200,000 N-Gages to the scrap heap.
And why would they do that? Recent statements are they they've moved as many as 600,000 now and are estmating sales of between 6 and 9 million by years end. Why exactly would they throw away 200,000 units?
Christopher Rydberg (aka Game_Hunter)
[email][email protected][/email]
Nokia initally placed 400,000 units int he rtail chain in Oct 2003, and placed another 200,000 before Christmas, and possibly another 100,000 in january, which is a pretty standard ratio for a growing product. It compares nicely to the initial numbers Palm had at the launch of the Palm Pilot.
let's assuming they're making a markup of around a minimum of $45 a unit, then for 700,000 units we'd have a profit of $31,500,000.
Rather strange definition of a flop, don't you think?