One of the spotlight gifts for my son (yes, really for my son) this year will be a Nintendo DS - and I've just saw that Nintendo sold 500K in the first week and hopes to sell a million before the end of the year. And that's how many will have been sold to end users, not the number in the channel. That's impressive, and I'll mention that's probably a stretch to how many N-Gages have been sold by Nokia in the last year.
Supposedly the wireless discovery on the units works really well - but it takes a volume like this for that to work. It's not out of the realm of possibility that sitting in an airport terminal, your kid could easily find other opponents to play network games against on the local network, not to mention the wi-fi network (in the future). I just don't see that happening with an N-Gage because you'd never find that level of saturation.
And here's the kicker...not all people in the area have to have a copy of the game. The slaves can download and play the game in multiplayer mode from the master. In a copy-protected crazy, world, that's forward thinking by Nintendo.
Posted by Steve at December 3, 2004 12:18 AM | TrackBack