This is a bad start. The games industry works on the basis of a "razors and razorblades" business model, where companies sell consoles at a loss on the basis that they'll make the cash back from sales of first-party software and licensing fees on third-party software. Nokia seems to want to ignore this model by charging the consumer full price for the console - which will make N-Gage attractive to publishers by removing the license fee, but will equally make it hugely unattractive to consumers because the basic cost of the thing may be as over twice the price of a full-power home console like the Xbox or PS2.
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Equally, however, it's painfully apparent that this is a unit designed by a company with precisely zero experience of building game systems. For a start, the number of buttons on the front of the unit is ludicrous, and
it's extremely easy to brush the wrong button while playing a game and find that you've inadvertently managed to quit out or bring up a pause menu; but despite the millions of fascia buttons, Nokia hasn't seen fit to include any shoulder buttons. Doh!
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It gets worse, too; games are distributed on postage-stamp sized MMC memory cards, which is a bad choice in itself as MMC memory is flimsy and expensive (expect to have to store your games in plastic cases for protection outside the unit, a far cry from the near-indestructible robustness of GBA cartridges), but worse again than this is
the fact that the act of slipping in a new game involves removing the back of the unit, taking out the battery and sliding the game home into a SIM card style slot. This, needless to say, is a stunningly bad piece of design and the need to juggle about five separate bits of kit in order to play a new game isn't going to win the unit any fans.
) here at Motorola where it was reported to be going into production and due to be on shelves around May. And I might add, I was the Motorola liaison for Bluetooth when we kicked off this technology back in what, '99? I was the guy coordinating logistics between Moto, the Finnish, and the Japanese.
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