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Gamelab 2011: Trip Hawkins: 'The Browser Will Win'
by Brandon Sheffield [Social/Online, Smartphone/Tablet, Business]
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June 29, 2011
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The browser, Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins is certain, will win out as the new ultimate platform for games. With the lowest barrier to entry on both the consumer and developer/publishing sides, and HTML5 rapidly improving, Hawkins thinks the days of retail distribution are numbered.
"Why is it that in movies there are always so many sequels? Why is it in games?" he posed at his Gamasutra-attended Gamelab 2011 talk in Barcelona. "It's because everyone's so afraid."
He explained, "They have big retail costs, they have big marketing costs ... Why would the retailer want to try something new? So they want to go with a proven brand, and the guys with the financial muscle can get behind it too."
That's the traditional retail industry. Hawkins -- an industry veteran who was an original founder of Electronic Arts -- showed a slide with the 10 tenets on which he helped build EA and bring it to massive success. "None of this applies anymore," he said. "Instead, we have a search and social discovery clickfest. Our friends help us find things we're looking for, and we can try them for free."
"The browser has already won on the PC," says Hawkins. "It'll win on the tablets. It'll take longer for it to adapt to the smaller screens, the iPhones and the like, but it will."
But it's not just any content Hawkins sees succeeding. "What you're going to see is free to play, pay for items in the browser," he says. "That's where all the money is going to be."
Though it may be only a percentage of users paying the money, they do pay a lot. Why? Because as Hawkins says, "$1,000 is a cheap price to pay to be king." People want to pay in order to dominate all the people playing for free, he says. "You could spend all this money in real life, and you might still be a loser," added Hawkins. "But you spend this money in a free to play game, and you become king!"
For Digital Chocolate, whose games include Millionaire City, this process is well underway. "If you had Googled any of our properties four years ago, you wouldn't have gotten a lot of page hits," he admitted. "Now we get over a million page hits," because of all the brand awareness given the studio's Facebook games, which have a million daily players. You don't have to pay for that traffic either.
Support is for browser games is accelerating, as well. There are a lot of hardware, software, and web companies that are losing now because of the disruption caused by Apple and Facebook, he says. "It's too late to just try to copy what Apple did. They're going to need a new idea, and the new idea's going to be browser. Just you watch."
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The browser isn't really a "new idea" but as far as trend-spotting goes you can see the wave approaching now so as Trip says, it's a good idea to have your surf board ready to ride the wave.
Accessibility is key to anything now or upcoming in games. Unless you know what you are doing courting the core crowd that will get into a deep and challenging game (like Demon Souls) it's a risk.
Along with browser growth, Trip is right about F2P games growing. As a business model it works really well, but it doesn't always give the player the best experience. The main concern I have with the player side of F2P is that many companies earn more than just $1,000 from someone trying to be a virtual king. If a player feeds his ego more than he feeds himself, you are clearly in a position where intervention is necessary.
Now digital download services like Steam, now we are talking! More people are moving to services like this that any other that I am aware of.
I doubt he's suggesting that browsers will somehow out-compete Steam and its competitors, in any case. They're very different markets aimed at very different experiences.
Thank you Steam and Big Fish and other portals. Many of them will still be in business in 20 years, when I may retire. (wish me luck :-)
If you read the word 'browser' as 'a person who browses for games using digital distribution tools' then I agree wholeheartedly with his statement. (is that cheating?)
It is not that I am inherently against the idea of Web Browser games. But I see this as an issue that has to be solved between the video game industry and the ISP industry. Band width caps SUCK. I see the issue as the 800 lb. gorilla sitting the corner of the room that not many people want to admit is there staring at us silently.
BTW, thanks Cordero W. :)
Besides, I don't see his point, everything, he criticizes about the current market, would apply to browser games too, development costs would rise to a level, current console games have now and the process of creative stagnation due to fear of loosing money would be there in the same way.