Nokia N-Gage Games Moving to N-series

Disappointing sales of Nokia's N-Gage phone/portable gaming device have spurred the company to make the games available for Nseries "digital convergence" devices.

At its Nokia Mobility Conference in Barcelona, Finland’s Nokia admitted it’s failed to meet its goals with the Nokia N-Gage combined phone and portable gaming device. Nokia had boasted it would sell 6 million units in its first three years, and instead the company managed to sell only 2 million units worldwide.

The N-Gage, originally designed to compete with products line Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance handheld game unit, has faced strong competition from Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) and faces a new challenge with from the Nintendo DS. Sony estimates it will sell 13 million PSPs by March 2006.

However, Nokia says it’s not giving up on the N-Gage, and will be bringing games originally developed for the N-Gage to its high-end N-series multimedia smartphones.

The move could be enough to keep developers interested in Nokia’s gaming platform alive. If the company can achieve enough sales through both N-Gage and N-series customers, game makers should still be interested in brining their titles to Nokia’s systems