Hawkins: 'The Browser Is The Platform Of The Future'

At the Game Developers Conference last week, Electronic Arts and now Digital Chocolate (Millionaire City) founder Trip Hawkins worried that evolutions in the multiplatform space would pose major challenges for developers trying to earn money in emerging spaces. Now, speaking on Bloomberg Television, the industry veteran is offering his thoughts on how it might all shake out. "For all of the big media companies, this phase of disruption is dramatic and happening fast," he says. "Where it's really going to lead is where the function of the browser is going." The explosion of browsers onto mobile devices and the rise of cloud-based gaming can take much of the credit for why Hawkins, who was also Apple's director of marketing prior to founding EA, believes that it'll end up the game industry's most central platform. "The browser has taken over 2 billion PCs--it's going to be taking over a billion tablets over the next few years, billions of mobile devices," he says. And it'll even enter new areas: "It will end up in my opinion very strong on the television. The browser is the platform of the future," Hawkins adds. Cloud-based rendering is increasingly enabling consumers to access content from a number of devices whether or not they own that content, thus "there is going to be enormous growth there," he says. Consumers will be able to integrate that content more persistently in their daily lives and want to remain engaged with it, versus traditionally when content was segregated to the living room or to a single computer. "We are seeing a shift from passive escapist media where people 'check out,' and people are feeling too checked out," Hawkins observes. "They are looking for social media, ways to check in. That is a fundamental shift." "Every company needs to be doing more to migrate," he adds. "I think every one of these big companies need to be doing more than they are."