So the media welcome Sony's online distribution of old PlayStation games, but have poured scorn on Nokia's attempt to do the same with old N-Gage titles? Ewan points out this contradiction and looks forward to vindication of Nokia's strategy when the 'N-Gage platform' becomes mature.
Read on in the full article.
Well, it's partly that any hype about the PlayStation series is over-reacted to by the gaming media, many are still under its spell and think it's invincible.
Hopefully the trouncing of the PSP in sales terms by the technically much more primitive DS (with its bestselling games a cuter-than-cute puppy simulator, a cuter-than-cute village simulator, and a no-graphics-at-all maths test simulator) will make journalists think again about what it is that most people really want. Tech specs mean nothing without decent content and a decent interface, yet so many reviewers still tend to drool over hardware instead of thinking about how much fun people could have with something.
It's also partly that journalists decided the N-gage was bad in 2003, and for some of them nothing (not even a load of decent games which we got in late 2004) is going to change their minds.
The thing is, the majority of console gamers and the vast majority of phone gamers never read gaming magazines or websites, they just buy whatever appeals to them, which is why so many poor games based on films sell so well as most people never see the games' reviews.
What Nokia's doing is putting a games store and XBox Live-style online gaming community on most or all of their S60 phones from 2007 onwards, which isn't just bypassing the existing retail system, it's bypassing the existing games promotion system.
Crucially, this store will let you try games for free for an hour or so, or hire games for a day or a week, or buy them outright. People buying games on their S60 will become their own reviewers, they won't have to read a review or go hunting for a demo disc, they can just try the game and see if they like it. If they want it, all they do is press a button and it's theirs, they don't even have to get out of bed. They'll also buy the phones anyway regardless of what games are available, heck they buy them now with no games available, so it's not like userbase size will be a problem either.