News

N-Gage chart confirms swing to casual

ONE drops out as poker takes top spot

N-Gage chart confirms swing to casual
If you needed more proof that N-Gage is becoming a big platform for casual gaming, take a look at the latest sales chart, published by Nokia late last week.

Glu's World Series of Poker: Pro Challenge takes top spot, followed by Tetris, Asphalt 3: Street Rules, FIFA 09, and Cafe Solitaire 12-Pack.

It means Nokia's beat 'em up ONE has dropped out of the chart a few weeks after it went on sale. Perhaps more significantly, it's the first time the N-Gage Top 5 hasn't featured one of Nokia's first-party games.

Neither of these are meant to be criticisms. The dominance of casual games shows that embedding the N-Gage client in popular handsets like the N96 is attracting a broader gaming audience, while the popularity of third-party titles may encourage more publishers to throw their weight behind Nokia's platform.

There may be a concern over whether the considerable budgets invested in games like ONE and Reset Generation are paying off in sales, though.

However, the challenge for third-party N-Gage publishers in 2009 will be to come up with a second wave of casual games that make more use of N-Gage's technology and community features than their first titles did.
Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)