My friend and colleague Scott Foe kicked off his blog with a post titled “What the F*ck N-Gage?” For those of you that don’t recall the device, the N-Gage was Nokia’s failed foray into the gaming market. Scott used to work at Sega during the Dreamcast days and was a key player at Nokia during the N-Gage period. He knows all about failed consoles and labels himself as “the undisputed most-spectacular failure that the games industry has ever witnessed”. I respectfully disagree with that self assessment.
Scott’s rant covers all sorts of topics, but my favorite part covered the failure of the N-Gage. Here’s a snippet:
Who could deny that the N-Gage was a spectacular failure? A “failure,” because, today, there are more people who own my self-produced album of J-Pop lounge-covers, Sakura Scotty, than own N-Gages. A “spectacular” failure, because there wasn’t a man, woman, nor publisher-side producer in the games industry that didn’t see it fail.
The logic of Nokia’s games strategy was so straightforward as to be un-ignorable, “We are Nokia, the largest handset manufacturer in the world, absolute masters of sourcing and logistics, capable of buying component parts for cheaper and putting the products for sale in more places than any other organization on the planet. The games industry is worth billions, and when we throw our winter cap into the ring, we will take a piece of that market.” The logic was also terminal due to a very straightforward lack of heart.
I covered the hell out of the N-Gage back in 2003. I loved the idea of a connected gaming platform integrated into a mobile phone. The potential was awesome and realized today in Android, iOS, etc. The problem was that Nokia was never (and still isn’t) great at software; expecting the company to build a robust backend and an intuitive frontend for gaming was a little ridiculous when viewed through the good old retroscope. The other problem was that Nokia was (and still is) great at making hardware, but laid an egg with the N-Gage. Nokia made (and still makes) some of the most beautiful phones in the history of the business. The N-Gage doesn’t look or feel like Nokia hardware at all.
Anyway, kindly read Scott’s blog when you have a chance. It’s witty, insightful, and intelligent.
