Mobile Gaming: Interview With EA Founder

There’s an interesting interview with Trip Hawkins of Digital Chocolate who co-founded Electronic Arts. The learnings here could be applied to how a brand uses gaming on phones: Here’s a snippet:

Is the wild success of the Nintendo DS (and failure of all hybrid phone-game devices) an indication that perhaps gaming is best suited for dedicated gaming devices?

There are important differences between a good phone and a good game console, even a handheld one. The phone needs to fit in your pocket, be comfortable to hold up to your ear, and cost less than $100. What it can do as a computer on the world’s largest network is today perceived as a bonus, but again the consumer’s bias is on social value, not entertainment fidelity. Since there are more than 2 billion of these devices, we can make a living, and it is a mass market consumer. When you turn to game consoles, the customer wants a high fidelity way to kill time playing a game, often alone. This calls for a larger, heavier, and more costly device that pretty quickly does not make a very good phone. And the program sizes are so huge that it is not practical to transmit them over the cell network. Nintendo did a great job with the DS, using Nintendogs to define it as a first-rate platform. Nintendo grasps many of the requirements of mobile lifestyle without it having anything to do with phones. But these are pretty separate markets today. Some of our products, like AvaPeeps, Tornado Mania, and Brain Juice, approach the tempo and rhythm of mobile life in the same way that Nintendo does with the DS. You get a “taste” of what I mean from our company name and our slogan, “Seize the Minute.”

Do you believe that the technological constraints of phones (i.e. processing power, small displays, etc) foster creativity as much as hamper it?

It’s a craftsmen’s trade. The best mobile developers are passionate and ingenious at working around the constraints and having vision about new user behaviors. Some console developers are so accustomed to the high-powered environment that they cannot adapt to mobile; they need that larger canvas. To each his own.

Game Tycoon»Blog Archive » Interview with Trip Hawkins (Digital Chocolate)

[via CDB]