Digital Chocolate founder and CEO ‘Trip’ Hawkins recently appeared on CNBC in a CNBC Exclusive interview “Tech: It’s All About Apps."
In the piece, Hawkins discusses the unique, social nature of mobile gaming today and echoes his earlier sentiments that the iPhone is a “breakthrough platform" that is leading the new wave of connected mobile devices that are being heavily embraced by today’s “omni consumers," a new sort of user interested in interacting with digital media of many forms and on many different levels.
Hawkins expresses great satisfaction with the performance of his studio’s games on the iPhone platform (four of the studio’s games have hit #1 in the App Store) and calls Digital Chocolate “the #1 game company on the iPhone," based on 20 million downloads of their games, or 2% of all App Store downloads.
According to Hawkins, Sony and Nintendo should be very concerned by the iPhone’s success and the degree to which today’s omni consumers are embracing this new type of device.
They’re using all kinds of platforms, many of them are brand new. And they’ve got a very different expectation [from gamers 10 years ago]. They’re really looking more for social value than for escapism. They want to find new ways to check in and be in contact with people than just checking out and doing something by themselves.
Trip Hawkins left Apple in 1982 to form Electronic Arts. He was the man behind 3DO and formed mobile development studio Digital Chocolate in 2003.
