It's only a few days since Nokia's ambitious launch of the N-Gage and the first news from the sales front are not all that encouraging. In the U.K., after a week of availability in videogame retailers, the phone-mp3-gaming device has only sold under 500 units. Although it is expected to have sold more through mobile phone retailers, who heavily subsidize the device in order to sign people on to expensive contracts, it is the gaming market which Nokia wanted to convince about N-Gage. Such a sluggish response, in the products launch week, can only suggest Nokia did not create the market anticipation for N-Gage they aimed for.
As an indication of how N-Gage sold, you may consider that Nintendo's GBA, in a week that saw no hot titles released, outsold N-Gage at a ratio of 30:1. It is, of course, too early to predict how Nokia's device will fair in the cut-throat gaming market but a launch week should set the sales benchmark which the company should strive to compete with all through the year.
As far as software is concerned, the N-Gage title chart saw Eidos' Lara Croft top the sales list while Sega got second and third with Super Monkey Ball and Sonic N respectively. Pandemonium gave Eidos the fourth spot while Tony Hawk came fifth.Since the device comes in bundles offering some of these titles it is still very early to speculate on the tie ratio for N-Gage but we will have a lot of time to work that out, during the holiday period.
