N-Gage launching next week, at least for some people
By Stefan Constantinescu on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 6:29 PM PST In Nokia, Ovi
N-Gage, Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s software platform for delivering video games to Nseries users, is poised to launch next week, but only for owners of the N81. Ricky Cadden shot me a very angry instant message with the news. This is quite devastating and a marketing stunt that most certainly pisses more people off than makes happy. Personally I’m not too trigger happy about the platform, a delay doesn’t affect me, but I know a lot of you N95, N82 and N95 8GB users must be foaming from the mouth.
A lot of us here remember the disaster that was the original N-Gage’s launch in 2003. That went wrong for many different reasons, but one of the biggest reasons was that they launched before they were ready. There were no first party games, the Arena didn’t work globally, and the best games didn’t arrive until a year later, by which time the N-Gage was ignored by the gaming world.
If Nokia want to take a while extra to get this launch right, that’s a much better thing than repeating the disaster of 2003. I’m not happy about them constantly altering the launch date, but I’d be less happy if they launched a broken service.
Although Nokia hasn’t used the phrase, their recent announcement about a limited rollout of the Next Gen N-Gage platform next week has all the hallmarks of a public beta test. The service will only be available to N81 and N81 8GB owners, and it will consist of “one or more games”. This clearly isn’t a launch, but this very limited rollout of a “pre-release version” is possibly the only way that Nokia can make sure the platform has been properly tested with large numbers of real world users. By most laypeople’s definition, that’s called beta testing, and it’s odd that Nokia seems to be avoiding that phrase.