Finnish cell phone giant Nokia will stand by its N-Gage gaming phone despite the device's slow adoption by the market, and even as the company broadens gaming throughout its phone lineup, Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson said on Wednesday.
Despite competition in the handheld game market from the likes of Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co. Ltd., Simonson said it made sense for Nokia to have both a dedicated gaming phone as well as gaming features in its broader lineup.
"We are a product company. That's a virtue, not an evil," Simonson told the Reuters Technology Summit. "How we're going to play the gaming business across the whole portfolio is what you need to keep an eye on, and part of that is including with the N-Gage game decks, obviously."
The N-Gage was introduced in 2003 to broad derision in the games industry. Gaming fans did not like that they had to turn the unit off and remove the battery to change games, and phone users did not like the setup for making phone calls.
A new version in 2004, the N-Gage QD, fixed many of those problems and achieved wider distribution in the United States, but it remained something of an afterthought in the industry compared to handhelds from Nintendo and Sony.
"Our approach to this is, let's continue to take what we've learned, what we've done right, and where we need to make corrections, and that's in retail, in games development and in the deck itself," Simonson said.
He said the volume of N-Gage sales to date was "somewhat disappointing" but not entirely bad compared to other gaming product launches of the past. Nokia has sold about 1.5 million N-Gages to date.
"Mobile gaming is here to stay, the question is how the value chain is created and who can take advantage of it," he said.
Simonson also acknowledged there had been management changes in the N-Gage unit. Gerard Weiner took the helm of the unit earlier this year and will meet with the gaming community at next week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Simonson declined to discuss the changes in detail.
