AfterDawn: News

N-Gage service is killed, again

For what seems like the millionth time, Nokia has announced it will be killing off the N-Gage gaming platform, moving its focus to the Ovi mobile store instead.

The phone manufacturer has stopped publishing new games in the format and will completely kill the N-Gage Arena and other community features in September 2010.



"As mobile gaming evolves and begins to encompass social gaming, we want to offer one store front with an even broader portfolio of games - games for everyone," said Nokia. "It's much more convenient to have one place to get all your mobile games, and this is what Ovi Store provides."

Handsets including the N-Gage application will continue to ship "for some time" but the company says they will no longer ship any games with the systems.

N-Gage first failed in 2003 as a standalone gaming platform and was originally announced as a smartphone app in 2005. The service hit multiple year delays and was only fully made available in 2008.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 2 Nov 2009 14:19

• Previous article

• Windows 7 surpasses 3 percent market share

• Next article

• Q2 PS3 sales up significantly year-on-year, company shows large loss

• 3 comments

• porosus

  who actually bought one of those things? i remember them being referred to as "the talking taco" and you had to take the battery out to change games. almost as bad as the Virtual Boy in my opinion.

  2.11.2009 17:09 #1

• NHS2008

  Oh, Great! I cant believe I just purchased N85 few months back!! cause this n-gage 2.0 was quiet interesting! the games were good and were even rated well! and now they are killing it!! what about my N85?!
  and their reason.
  "As mobile gaming evolves and begins to encompass social gaming, we want to offer one store front with an even broader portfolio of games - games for everyone," said Nokia. "It's much more convenient to have one place to get all your mobile games, and this is what Ovi Store provides."
  
  
  that means we will lose all good 3-d and in-depth games and will have to do with "broader and for everyone" puzzles and trivia!!
  and as for the one place to access all your games wait, ...wasn't that what n-gage app did?? so my 369 MHZ 128 MB RAM phone will have to play java games!! I am sooo thrilled!!
  
  OSN Lets hope game developers DO make quality games in .sisx format for S60 3rd ed.

  3.11.2009 06:59 #2

• bam431

  Worst gaming system of all time I think maybe.

  3.11.2009 09:08 #3