About Trip Hawkins: Trip Hawkins is an American entrepreneur and founder of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company and Digital Chocolate.
Console game publishing has become more like theatrical release film-making and it is very hard if you are not one of the major publishers, and even for them it is hard unless they are working with major game brands.
Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive!
Online console gaming will continue to grow at a healthy pace.
As a result, we will continue to see more innovation on the Internet and on mobile phones than on consoles.
From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start.
None of our competitors have ever made two systems that run the same software.
We want to make as big a market as we can with our current product.
The way companies hang on to their marketshare is by being scared.
I'm not saying that more performance wouldn't be better - all these technologies are going to get better - that's the difference between first generation and second generation.
With our next generation hardware, polygon rendering will probably be an area we'll get more heavily into.
If you always wanted to wait for something better, you'd never buy anything, right?
So the guy that we're really targeting our system at this year is one of the guys who brought a 16bit system three or four years ago and has pretty much had it with that, and he's ready to buy something new.
But we also think that we've got more quite alot more support than any new format has ever had.
What that means initially is that you have alot of products that are only slightly better games in the same genre on another machine - and the titles that really take advantage of the machine come along later.
We'll look at the japanese launch as a model and aspire to have things go as well as they did over there.
I can't tell you how important it was for us to be successful in japan.
But any big change is more likely to result if there is a disruptive event such as new technologies or platforms that have a surprising effect on market share.
We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers.
And initially, a lot of companies avoid trying to make a really radical new kind of title for a new system, because that would involve learning a new machine and learning how to make the new title at the same time.
There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.
