Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...N-Gaged
khenry
Next in my accidental series of big companies screwing up; Nokia. Their N-Gage platform flopped and died five years ago so you’d have thought that they would pull out all the stops to make the follow-up, a success. However, an N-Gage fan site reported that whatever the circumstances (except for repairs), Nokia refuses to let you move your games to another phone when you change handsets.
There’s not much to say after that (except on the relevant forum )- it’s commercial suicide for the platform, for the second time, on a level rivalling Creative’s self-made troubles of the past two months. Some people might try to pirate these games, but it’s unlikely - by looking at the mobile market, people change handsets for looks, camera quality, or just because an operator needs to seal a deal. Expecting people to just buy their games again and give Nokia lots of free profit, or put the cost of replacing N-Gage games into any insurance policy if their “home” handset is lost or stolen, isn’t going to be a popular suggestion.
Copying Steam and keeping an individual account list of games would be a much better idea. Then the software could have been uninstalled on one handset, and downloaded all over again on the replacement model. That’s commonsense though, so Nokia will never do that…
UPDATE: The power of the internet strikes again. Yesterday, Nokia announced that they were working on a solution to the situation which would balance the needs of games publishers and customers. Thankfully the company realised that annoyed customers could just buy a mobile handset from LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Sagem. That would cause bigger losses for Nokia than Creative, which has outsourced its sound chips to other board makers even if you didn’t choose to buy specific Soundblaster cards.
This article has no comments yet.