Nokia’s Presence in the Mobile Gaming Industry
Mobile gaming is a niche area of the wider industry – and it’s an anomaly, given that individual areas of mobile gaming are hugely profitable projects. You only need to explore the success of free-to-play games or the rapid, sustained growth of the casino industry to see that there’s a phenomenal market for mobile gaming. However, it’s a difficult design to nail, as many people prefer to have gaming as a side option on their phone rather than the whole purpose of its design, and it’s something Nokia has had a turbulent relationship with over the last two decades.
Did Nokia Fall Behind The Chasing Pack?
Some analysts believe Nokia dropped the ball because it had developed such a notable brand reputation in the 1990s. As Blackberry devices and iPhones started to offer considerably better, cheaper, and more convenient alternatives, Nokia failed to keep its devices as in demand as its landmark models, such as the 3310.
While innovative features like creating your own ringtone and playing Snake were a total revelation at the time, Nokia started to sit on its laurels—besmirching the rise of smartphones and touchscreen devices as a fad. It was an expensive mistake. Nokia has never struggled to be a marketable and highly profitable company. However, it only takes one wrong decision like this to fall by the wayside, especially when you’re competing with other innovative companies like Apple on a global scale. Ultimately, it’s had a knock-on impact on their wider presence in the mobile phone industry and their standing in mobile gaming.
Apple – The New Sheriff In Town
The first iPhone completely changed the way the world approached mobile phones. They went from something we used to simply call and text our friends to devices that could do everything. Although internet connectivity was reasonably limited on mobile devices in the mid to late 2000s, Apple understood where society and mass internet connectivity would be within the next 10 to 15 years.
Apple compounded this growth by identifying how gamers would use mobile phones. Whether they were playing word association games or casino games like roulette, the touch screen was the way forward. Around the same time, the digital casino industry started to post colossal profit margins as countries like the UK revolutionized their digital legislation to include mobile phones and online platforms in casino legislation.
Roulette was one of the first casino games to transition to mobile platforms and become a significant part of the industry. Now that the online roulette industry is global and forks in multi-billion dollar profit margins yearly, it’s easy to lose sight of where it all started.
While playing roulette games on mobile in the late 2000s was pretty cumbersome and clunky, Apple’s persistence in becoming the dominant name in smartphones meant that they quickly became the number one route for people to play mobile casino games—a serious blow to Nokia, which continued losing ground.
The Gaming Revolution – Nokia NGage & Beyond
We can sit here and throw mud at Nokia and focus on what they did wrong, but all corporations do something wrong at some point. They make a bad investment; they pile money into ideas that become unprofitable; it’s all about adjustments. Just ask Blockbuster if they regret acquiring Netflix for $50 million in the late 2000s.
As soon as Nokia realized that this shift was moving away, and they were quickly losing their grip at the top of the mobile phone sector, they did not switch their stance on smartphones. This lost ground in the mid-2000s, and the colossal Japanese corporation has been unable to make up the ground since.
The Nokia NGage was their first attempt to become the biggest name in the mobile gaming industry in 2002. It was a truly innovative idea, but some reviewers believe it suffered because it was too ahead of its time—people were not ready to shift from playing Snake to playing portable games like Tomb Raider. Others believed it was impractical and shaped like a Taco – meaning it picked up the unfortunate moniker of “Taco Phone.”
Summary
Although there are specialist mobile gaming phones, the brutal truth is that they aren’t popular enough for companies to make a significant profit. Apple did enough market research in the noughties and 2010s to understand that if they had a phone that could do everything else and had a respectable enough gaming processing power, it would be suitable enough to sell to the masses. Their profits throughout the 2010s were a testament to this business strategy.
Nokia was led into unprofitable areas of the market, and although there are still millions of Nokia phones in circulation, they’re also more than competent mobile gaming phones. You’re not going to go wrong with a Nokia phone; there are plenty of solid, affordable options. Nokia has rightly taken a step back from focusing solely on gaming phones and developing devices that are universal instead of prioritizing niche designs and ideas that might appeal to ardent fans, but ultimately prove to be less profitable.
