N-Gage sells under 5,000 units at US launch

An independent market research firm has released sales figures for Nokia's N-Gage in the USA, revealing that the game deck has sold under 5,000 units across both videogame and mobile phone retailers.

No official figures for shipments, sales or pre-orders of the N-Gage have been forthcoming from Nokia, although last week the company's CEO, Jorma Ollila, said that "many outlets sold out of the device during the first day of release" and claimed that the company was seeing "strong order intake from distributors and retailers."

Ollila's comments now look a little odd in the cold light of sales figure reality. The US figures, which were collected by independent firm Arcadia Research and claim to cover every outlet that stocked the N-Gage in the USA, make this out to be one of the weakest console releases ever - not to mention a very poor performance for a new high-end mobile phone.

Although no figures covering mobile phone outlets in the UK are available as yet, this week's Chart-Track figures reveal that the N-Gage continues to sell poorly at videogame retailers, with slightly fewer units sold this week than in the device's first week on sale - leaving the overall number sold in the first fortnight at under a thousand units.

This figure is probably misleading because game retailers are selling the device at full price while it is available with subsidies and mobile network contracts at dedicated phone retailers; however, there's simply no way of telling at the moment whether consumers are buying into the device with contracts. Nokia itself certainly isn't saying, and the mobile phone stores we spoke to were reluctant to comment on the sales of the device.

1up, Arcadia Research