Money can't buy you love in the mobile games industry.
Many companies, after cooking up a totally unique, can't-miss angle to unlock the market's fabled treasures, have tried to take a shortcut to success by purchasing it outright--with marketing blitzes, experimental technologies, lavish parties and junkets, grand licensing and retail deals, imperialistic acquisitions strategies, or any combination thereof--only to be flummoxed by byzantine structural limitations, buffeted by technical problems, batted from one mobile carrier to the next, and eventually thrown out on their ear millions of dollars lighter.
No Easy Route To Success?
It sounds harsh, but this treatment is practically a rite of passage into the mobile marketplace, where tempting cul-de-sacs outnumber real opportunities by at least an order of magnitude. Those firms that have the resources to pay the high costs of learning through experience, and can survive making a few rotten decisions, usually come back into the market with more realistic expectations; even if quick success remains elusive, they are ready to do things they know will make money and build market share.
Just ask Nokia, whose N-Gage platform was the poster child for unwise expenditure. After a period of reflection, Nokia has readied a new mobile gaming strategy designed to set the debacle right and earn back its good name in mobile gaming--and this time, it sounds like it might be workable.
Gaming blogs have been choked with N-Gage anecdotes for years, so I'll limit my contribution to a single example. One of my former GameSpot colleagues, a longtime video games journalist and critic, once told me a little story about the N-Gage's grand debut at E3 2003. As soon as he saw the original device's form-factor--the infamous "game taco," complete with side-talking functionality!--he turned to another editor and remarked, "well, that's that."
He didn't have to play any actual N-Gage games, or even pick up the device, to know that the N-Gage was DOA, especially at its $300 price point. Judging by the N-Gage's anemic sales numbers and poor retail presence, a lot of other gamers reached the same conclusion.
Making Amends For A Bad Start
Nokia realized almost immediately that the launch was a catastrophe. It made a superhuman effort to save the expensive project by quickly reengineering the device, lowering its price, wooing the games media, and rushing out new titles, but the damage had already been done. The N-Gage was the laughingstock of the entire video games industry, and before long, Nokia was having trouble getting any new N-Gage games out the door at all.
By the time the N-Gage finally built up a decent games library, Nokia had spent two full years throwing good money--bales of it--after bad. At the end of 2005, the head of Nokia's Multimedia division finally stated the obvious: Nokia needed to "make some changes."
So, Nokia has clearly taken its medicine. What's the new plan? The company started tracing the outlines at E3 2005, when N-Gage chief Gerard Wiener first introduced a range of prospective advances that would move the N-Gage platform away from the console space--where had it utterly failed to compete--in favor of the mobile games space, which is much more familiar territory to Nokia.
