Browsers are important because they are a kind of public square, a place that everyone shares and nobody owns.
It is the nature of browsers to deliver information in a reasonably similar way on very different machines (desktop PC, desktop Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, etc.)
This has enormous implications for game design:
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.
… 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.
— Leigh Alexander @ Gamasutra
Via SlashDot.
See also FarmVille Now Worth More Than EA —
- Farmville is a browser-based game that has made its parent company, Zynga, very rich very quickly
- Electronic Arts (EA) is the world’s largest developer and bricks-and-mortar distributor of computer games
