Brothers In Arms Shoots It Up On N-Gage
Hot on the heels of the Pro Series Golf launch last week, Nokia has released Brothers in Arms on its N-Gage gaming platform. Brothers in Arms is a Gameloft title, which likely means the trial period will last all of 10 seconds or so. The World War 2-set game allows you to drive around and shoot stuff., though I believe there’s a story line somewhere in there.
Unfortunately, the full version will set you back a whopping $13.50, which is incredibly pricey for a mobile game, in my opinion. The screenshots look good enough, and it’s pretty entertaining to play. The download is a space-sucking 37MB, so you may want to use WiFi for this puppy.
I’m glad that we’re seeing a steady stream of N-Gage games being launched, but I’m also pretty disappointed that we’re still using the same platform application that was originally launched, especially with its lengthy list of known bugs. Surely there’s an update coming soon?
Brothers in Arms should be available in your Showroom on the N-Gage app, though you may need to update and clear your cache to get it to show up. The desktop web-based Showroom still shows it as ‘Coming Soon’, as of this writing.
Update: Confirmed, Gameloft sucks, and the trial allows you to play for approximately 20 seconds (enough time to get absolutely zero idea of the actual game) before requiring money. Consider this one uninstalled, purely out of principle.
Downloading 37mb for a 20 second trial really sucks. They will never learn it. Anyone who just wants to try it before buying, may it be the new player just wants to look into the genre because he didn´t play it before will be disappointed and will be happily waiting for the cracked version just to try it out. Ridiculous what gameloft (and the other companies too) do there.Another reason why N-Gage 2.0 will fail.
Thanks for the link!
“Unfortunately, the full version will set you back a whopping $13.50, which is incredibly pricey for a mobile game, in my opinion.”
That’s the weakness of the dollar rather than any deliberate pricing strategy.
All N-Gage games are priced in Euros (10 for full price, 7 for budget) because it’s a European company, and most of N-Gage’s potential customers are in Europe too because that’s where S60 ownership is highest.
The Euro is currently extremely strong against the dollar, the strongest it’s ever been. Just to put some perspective on this, here are some other game-related prices in Europe expressed in dollar terms:
- A Nintendo DS game costs about $60
- A PS3 or Xbox 360 game costs about $100
- A Nintendo Wii console costs about $400
- A PS3 console costs about $600
- The original launch price of the PS3 console in Europe was $900
“Downloading 37mb for a 20 second trial really sucks. They will never learn it.”
Well, bear in mind the demo is actually a locked version of the full game, so when you buy the full game you don’t have to download or install anything, it just unlocks the demo.
But I do agree that even with a small download size having such brief time-limited demos is ridiculous, it will do nothing but harm to Gameloft’s sales. They’ve done this before on Block Breaker (30 seconds) and Midnight Pool (60 seconds).
It’s only Gameloft that uses time-limited demos on N-Gage though, all the other publishers have more conventional demos that include first levels or first stages.
@Krisse - yes, the converted price for those items are high, but the actual retail price isn’t. The Wii costs $250 here, and PS3 or Xbox games around $50-60.
If the Euro-Dollar is really the case, then that needs to be reassessed. You shouldn’t rely on that for retail pricing, imo. If it’s EUR 10 in Europe, it should be $10 in the U.S., just like the Nokia Music Store has launched with track prices in the local currency.
Well… I’m not sure N-Gage has really officially launched in the US anyway. There aren’t any American S60 devices on the official compatibility list (scroll right to the bottom):
http://www.n-gage.com/ngi/ngage/web/g0/en/get_ngage/download.html
I suspect the bottom line is that S60 devices sell very badly in America, so the N-Gage team aren’t going to give US localisation priority when they’ve got enough core stuff to deal with anyway (client bugs, new releases, website upgrades, new hardware features etc).
Nintendo used to do this to Europe during the 80s and 90s, they’d give priority to Japan and the US because Nintendo consoles never sold very well in Europe (most European gamers preferred computer games to video games during that period).
I know people talk about N-Gage games helping to sell S60 phones, but I honestly don’t think many people buy a phone for its games. IMHO phone games are the equivalent of a hotel minibar, there to tempt you to spend a little more after you’ve already booked the room. For most people, games are part of a package rather than a main feature.
Nokia Music Store is perhaps a bit different because that will work on cheap non-smart phones too, and you don’t actually need a phone at all (that’s what the monthly NMS subscription involves, unlimited tracks for PC playback only). There’s also a much wider audience for music than for games, so even a small market would have more potential customers.
I’m glad that I live in Norway as the upper price of the games have been staying on NOK 80 (about 15 $).
Even then I do feel it’s a little pricey (for some titles).
Without a doubt I do agree on the strategy that Gameloft provides in the games. It’s totally ridiculous with such a short demo time.
I do believe that most people know what they get when they buy different titles from Gameloft as all the games up until now have been available as Java versions.
However I feel they should change that as N-gage games does provide some better graphics and sounds compared to Java versions in which one does not always know beforehand.
But as Gameloft is a big company and things have worked for them that way, they ought to continue, which is a shame.
(Both on the PC and mobile market).
@Krisse - I can see your point, but with all of the Nokia execs paying lip service to the U.S., saying it’s high on their priorities, they surely aren’t showing it, and such an attitude towards N-Gage in the U.S. certainly isn’t better. Only recently was the U.S. even added as an option in the N-Gage entry page.
Just cause our currency might be weaker, doesn’t mean we should get a lesser experience or offering. I agree that N-Gage isn’t going to sell any handsets, and that’s fine. But reasoning that there aren’t many S60 users in the U.S., thus we should get a crappier experience is garbage.
Jul 20th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
[...] from AllAboutSymbian stated in a previous comment here on Symbian-Guru: I know people talk about N-Gage games helping to sell S60 phones, but I [...]