N-Gage 2003-2009: An Obituary

I won't miss it. I always thought it was remarkably mediocre.

@ew4n I think I'll miss the promise of N-Gage - like a finnish Mike Gatting the delivery was always a bit dodgy/

4hrs later and only one comment and reply. Compared to what else is out there, it was never going to keep up without *huge* investment not only in the software (abilities) but also the hardware. And getting developers enthused in the way that Apple have. Somehow. Strangely. When there's such a small chance of profitability from development. I think it was a wise decision to bail out and concentrate on the stuff that they know they're good at. Mmmm... trying to compile a list... 😉

The problem was no one took the platform seriously.thats why we got so many crap games.but if a game was crap,i wouldn't even download it.people only focus on the negative.Creatures of the deep,one,dirk dagger,reset generation,these are some of the best mobile games i ever played.i love ngage and i'm truely sad to hear this

This a really bad bad move for Nokia. Its shares already dropped today when the announcement was made with 3%.

But it is more than that. It is normal from all the phone users the N-Gage to be a niche, because put it simply smartphone is a niche in Nokia phones.
And N-Series is a niche in smartphones (considering all E-Series, Xpress Music and X-Series, N-Series, and number series running s60 OS) so there was no problem N-Gage was a niche in Nokia...

The bad move is when a company closes something with no replacemnt on the same level.

This happens with N-Gage closing � the N-Gage platform had a community behing with FRIENDS, network gaming, reviews, discussions and much more, and this can be only patially replaced by Ovi gaming, some features will never be replaced.

So then, Nokia did a very bad move because maybe that �niche� of users were core funs of the N-Series. And Nokia lost that 5% or 10% or 20% of users which will be certanly attracted by the many gaming titles on other platforms.

Why would any company close something with no replacement at the same level?

In my opinion, Nokia should have announced that they rename N-Gage as �OVI-Gaming� or �OVI N-Gage Games�, keep the platform and completely integrate it in OVI with keeping the accounts, the people inbox, messages, reviews. Of course, that means Nokia had to do the integration of N-Gage in OVI, but they did not want that, they took the sort way and said bye-bye.

I would not be surprised if Nokia will also CUT ANY OTHER SERVICE in the future, CUT Share on OVI, cut OVI MAIL, CUT even OVI MAPS, cut Ovi Music, etc because of the same reasons: they were niche�

N-Gage was a service loved by many gamers, they had friends on the N-Gage platform, partners to play with and Nokia instead of keeping the accounts and merge them into OVI, they simply delete this.

BAD MOVE Nokia.
Does Nokia really hate its customers? Does Nokia really care about us?

First of all, I've never been a fan of N-Gage, but.. It's getting very sad.. I think Nokia is letting down its customers.. it's shutting down the services like N-Gage.. it's releasing services that don't work (ovi.com..)... and it has a very shitty appstore (there's no real DRM for developer and for example the search is not working for the end user). I used to work for Nokia for several years (but luckily escaped some years ago), but all these things make me very sad..

Thanks for putting n-gage out of its misery. It was dead already, this is just an official approval of its death. N-gage's death was 100% Nokia's fault, they did not set any quality standards that could differentiate the quality of ngage games from the rest and allowed deveopers to dish out crap games for n-gage.

Another mistake accepted by Nokia.

3d hardware.....check
N-gage quality standards.....check
Xenon......still waiting

This is all very sad. I think it all comes down to Nokias inability to listen and communicate. Connecting People? Cool slogan for a company that is itself so immaculately DISconnected. Like the Queen insect whos head seems to be so far from the place where the eggs pop out and the real action is.

I can thank the original N-gage for starting my whole smartphone obsession in the begining of 2005. The realisation that I had actually bought myself a "PDA" which caused my old Ericsson to go skitting across the floor and elevated my Taco to Main Phone status.

The classic Ngage had a way better run than this miserable s*it. Thanks for posting that pic instead of one of the Ngage 2 phones..

How very annoying. I had the original N-Gage and enjoyed games on that one. But I didn't buy a phone that was compatible with the N-Gage platform until 3 weeks ago, when I got myself a black E52, and instantly installed and bought a few games for it. And now it's to be killed.

I think the N-Gage generation had three noticeable flaws to it.

1) It took too damn long for them to release it, they started to talk about releasing N-Gage to multiple S60 devices back in 2005, but we didn't see it until 2008.

2) Due the fact it took them so long, the initial N-Gage compatible devices, turned out to not be compatible with N-Gage at all, like the N73 and N93.

3) And most importantly, the poor selection of games. Besides the Dirk Dagger games, there aren't really anything that offer much of a story and at the same time the DD games offer a very poor replayability. The original N-Gage had some great RPGs like Rifts: Promise of Power and Shadowkey, but none of that on the N-Gage platform. Same with excellent turnbased games like Pathway to Glory and Civilization but none of that here either. And the kind of game I want to play the most, are RPGs. Instead we mostly got lightweight casual games, which isn't really that different from the java games available.

Seems more like a re-branding as games will start to be served through Ovi like everything else?

Are there n-gage specific APIs?

Dynite wrote:Seems more like a re-branding as games will start to be served through Ovi like everything else?

Are there n-gage specific APIs?

Yes, the N-Gage SDK has its own API set (without any "Symbianisms" like active objects, leaves, descriptors, etc.). The core graphics and audio APIs are separately available as RGA, Real-Time Graphics & Audio, on Forum Nokia. However, that does not include anything that relates to online/community gaming (Arena), game licensing, etc.

N-Gage is not being rebranded here. It will be gone when the systems are shut down and support stopped.

It was dead the minute it was born.

1) Nokia HAS to make everything SO DIFFICULT. Despite having the same OS on all N-gage devices, the capability was added in ugly chunks and sputters. Even today, some phones don't have it at all for no apparent reason.

2) The app took ages to load, and it was always half-baked. There was no advantage at all to playing N-gage versions of popular games except having to put up with endless button click s and unwieldy interfaces so typical of Nokia. The app mostly loaded on C: drive in many sets, effectively killing any halo effect of N97 in the process.

3) Major publishers openly expressed their disgust with the Nokia model

4) Good games were few and far between, and the lack of re-downloads killed any joy.

5) The phones supporting the platform were disparate in size and form factors, necessitating awkward control configurations and a mess of portrait/landscape ability. Example: N81 (the WORST, most CRIPPLED N-series of all time) did not have motion sensor or graphics acceleration, yet supported landscape gaming. N82, with BOTH, stuck to portrait.

6) The graphics were crippled by lack of 3D hardware in supporting phones, and the horrid QVGA resolution on screens that are tiny by today's standards.

7) It seems that what comes naturally to competitors, Nokia take ages to understand and implement. The list is endless: multiple desktops, kinetic scrolling, easier syncing, widgets, re-downloads etc. That's why they are suffering loss of market share.

8) I found the n-gage site to be horrid in design, in being handset-centric rather than game-centric.

9) The phones came with no preloaded freebie games.

It's trully amazing that, N900 and the squeeze-Apple-for-a-billion-bucks story aside, there is absolutely NOTHING positive being said about Nokia on the web at the moment. Nothing! And it's all Nokias fault. They've become Microsoft.

@doonit: Microsoft? They just released the best OS in their history. And the Zunes are as good as anyone. Winmo, despite being clunky and cumbersome, remains perhaps the most customizable phone OS around.

Nokia? Oh yes, Maemo 5. Beyond that....sigh

this has to be embarrassing for nokia. i will tell you exactly why Ngage was a failure, lack of 3D graphics hardware. when Ngage first started, the n95 and n82 were popular, and it seemed logical that nokia would only use phones with 3d hardware for Ngage. i remember there was ONE game that actually used the graphics hardware on the n95, and it was pretty awesome. then what does nokia do? they stop making phones with 3d hardware. duh.

look at the iphone gaming, the reason it is so good and popular is because the iphone has top end HARDWARE so the gaming experience is worth it. is this really so hard for nokia to have figured out? i don't care about the excuse that they wanted to have Ngage reach as many phones as possible. they should have made an entire range of top end phones with 3d hardware for the Ngage platform. then it would have had a chance to take off. instead they watered it down by making every cheap hardware phone attempt to be Ngage compatible, and look where things went. dead.

these things are not rocket science, i don't understand why nokia can't figure them out.

RogerPodacter wrote:this has to be embarrassing for nokia. i will tell you exactly why Ngage was a failure, lack of 3D graphics hardware. when Ngage first started, the n95 and n82 were popular, and it seemed logical that nokia would only use phones with 3d hardware for Ngage. i remember there was ONE game that actually used the graphics hardware on the n95, and it was pretty awesome. then what does nokia do? they stop making phones with 3d hardware. duh.

look at the iphone gaming, the reason it is so good and popular is because the iphone has top end HARDWARE so the gaming experience is worth it. is this really so hard for nokia to have figured out? i don't care about the excuse that they wanted to have Ngage reach as many phones as possible. they should have made an entire range of top end phones with 3d hardware for the Ngage platform. then it would have had a chance to take off. instead they watered it down by making every cheap hardware phone attempt to be Ngage compatible, and look where things went. dead.

these things are not rocket science, i don't understand why nokia can't figure them out.

You've hit the nail on the head at a slight angle, but basically you're right.

The N82 & N95 still have hardware thats got considerably greater gaming potential than any of the current releases bar the N900.

And to be honest, even the N900 lags behind the iPhone - almost the same hardware, bar the graphics abilities, which have about half the processing power of that in the iPhone.

I really had high hopes on the N95 platform for gaming, and Nokia decided against offering the 3D support for the N-Gage platform - utterly ridiculous.

Apples success is also down to the relative ease of development.

Nokia seems to have an allergy to common sense at times, and seem to go for the lower common denominator. Platform sharing does make sense wrt economies of scale, but to be honest does it really make sense for the end user if they find out that their shiny N97 has the same basic processing abilities (ie gaming) as the 5530 at a third/quarter of the price? Every S60 touch device from Nokia has the same processor, clock rate and memory.

In my opinion the only good thing the Ngage had was the games 😃 I mean what else do you think of when you hear the word "ngage"... and the game application was the only thing that survied from the ngage.. Just an other good example of:"we wan't too much and we know it but we do it anyway" ..