GDC 07: Trip Hawkins on Mobile Gaming's "Inferiority Complex"
EA founder, Digital Chocolate CEO, and self-proclaimed "slut for new media" Trip Hawkins opened up the Mobile Gaming track this morning with a talk about the potential of, well, mobile gaming. Hawkins is sick and tired of mobile gaming being a wasteland of second-hand properties, high royalty fees, and retro titles -- games that are downloaded by a tiny portion of cell phone users (5%), and even then only to "waste time."
"What we need to do," he says, "is find out how to make mobile a first-rate platform," something people want to pick up to play. If we do, he claims, there are potential billions out there for mobile sales. Hawkins compares the future shift to the success of the Nintendo DS. If Nintendo handled the DS like most developers handle mobile games, he says, we'd have ended up with watered-down ports of Mario games. Instead, DS gameplay have been created with the system's features in mind, and that makes it good. Improvement like that might even clear up what Hawkins calls mobile gaming's major "inferiority complex." Does mobile gaming look fat in that dress? Yes, it does.
