Avi Greengart on N-Gage QD

Avi Greengart, a Jupiter Analyst, has written about the new N-Gage QD:

But for game-first platforms, content is key, and that seems to have gotten buried. There haven’t been many must-have games for N-Gage.

And this is exactly where Nokia have gone wrong. There have been no must-have games for the “platform” (and I use that term loosely), which is always a bit of a hold-up for a gaming system.

Our research shows that phones and gaming can make sense in the right packaging – significantly, we have yet to see a phone-first/game-second device. The original N-Gage was game-first/phone-maybe; I look forward to categorizing the QD once I actually use one in the next couple weeks. Most J2ME and BREW phones – even the ones with itty bitty joysticks in lieu of 5 way buttons – are phone-first/game-maybe.

As I wrote in People Play Games on N-Gage Shock, Nokia desperately wanted N-Gage to be a new games console, but it turned out to be a phone that was geared towards playing games. This is exactly what Nokia have focussed on for the QD system, but I think they’ve missed an opportunity by failing to upgrade the J2ME support.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if we saw some other manufacturers following with phones that are geared to games in this way, but I suspect this might be one time when they don’t just copy everything Nokia does.

Jupiter Research has a lot to say about when to converge, what to converge, and what to keep primary.

I’m sure, but so do I ;-)