Trip Hawkins Quotations

With our next generation hardware, polygon rendering will probably be an area we'll get more heavily into.

Online console gaming will continue to grow at a healthy pace.

There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time.

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.

If you always wanted to wait for something better, you'd never buy anything, right?

As a result, we will continue to see more innovation on the Internet and on mobile phones than on consoles.

But we also think that we've got more quite alot more support than any new format has ever had.

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!

None of our competitors have ever made two systems that run the same software.

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.

From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start.

I can't tell you how important it was for us to be successful in japan.

We'll look at the japanese launch as a model and aspire to have things go as well as they did over there.

The only problem we've had is the amount of time it's taking people to develop titles.

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.

The way companies hang on to their marketshare is by being scared.

We want to make as big a market as we can with our current product.

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.

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.

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.

Lower labor costs and tax benefits have, for example, caused publishers like EA, UbiSoft, and others to move more production to Canada.

But we're fairly comfortable that our next generation hardware will blow everything those guys are doing out of the water!

I don't think prices will go up, in part because gamers can always rent the games.

What I see at this time is that there is a $94 billion gap to make up, and I think the mobile content industry can indeed catch up to voice. But I believe it'll take about eight years to do it.

Guys aren't apt to call up each other and say, 'Hi, I'm lonely ... let's talk.' They're much more inclined to join a baseball fantasy league or participate in a March Madness-type score-guessing group.

I think what's really happening in games right now is that there's something for everybody. The hardware is cheap. The systems are easy to use.

it isn't all about content. Not now, it isn't, anyway.

Steve never knew his parents. He makes so much noise in life, he cries so loud about everything, that I keep thinking he feels that if he just cries loud enough, his real parents will hear and know that they made a mistake giving him up.

Look at all the most successful online services we have now,

Today's top-rated games leverage the available infrastructure to deliver a rich experience and also leverage the inherent social connectivity that mobile gaming offers consumers. Digital Chocolate is highly supportive of this group's effort to advance the platform for mobile gaming and to enable a better user experience.

We are in Moscone West. This is the small Moscone. Across the street, you've got Moscone Center. You know what's going on there right now? It's all doctors, and they're learning about all the new drugs they're going to give us. Because we're not happy. And we're not sure why,

We're all going to be dead in 100 years, so in the meantime if you want to use the most advanced system this year, then you have to buy a 3DO.

There have always been a lot of exclusive licenses and sometimes the publisher cuts some corners or gets a bit lazy and the quality goes down.

We don't think we need a next-generation product until there's more pressure in the marketplace.

Besides, games like total eclipse and john madden football combine great texture-mapping and polygon rendering, and that's a pretty satisfactory experience right now.

I shouldn't speculate a lot about what their plans are because every company feels differently about when to announce what they're doing with 3DO.

Sorry to say it, but an awful lot of us are not happy, and we're not sure why. We're bored and lonely. Too often we're popping Prozac. We want to interact and be entertained constantly.

SONY have had a graphic workstation business; they understand polygon rendering and have special customers that demand it.

SEGA and SONY are anxious, and they're just trying to mess up our plans as best they can by promising the world everything.

Anything that comes along that gives people a new way to have social contact, they adopt it.

It is very unfortunate that it is now very hard to innovate because of the cost-structure.

None of the microprocessors Sony and Sega are using in their systems were available at the time we designed ours.

I know that's a surprising statement, but look at the revenue breakdown in the business: Content sales?meaning games, music, video, etc.?brings in less than 1 percent of all wireless IT revenue. Voice is a $98 billion dollar market, and data is at $4 billion. But content is only a small slice of the $4 billion data figure.

But if you brought a machine last year, you're not going to buy another system this year - no matter how good it is.

HD will only be relevant in the long run if applications like football use it effectively to enable you to see more of the field.

You'd be surprised at how many women are joining those leagues.

All those kids that played video games ten years ago, they're adults now and they've got even more money to spend, and there's a whole bunch of new kids as well.

You have to have the kind of personality where you're resilient and you can get up and keep moving and learn what there is. What I tell my employees is, 'I want you to make mistakes. If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough. But, when we make a mistake, let's all study it. Let's all learn from it. After that, we want to make different mistakes. We don't want to keep making the same mistakes.'

I have a number of famous quotes, and one of them is, if you get knocked down, get back up again. I don't really feel like I want to let anything ultimately defeat me.

You know you're gonna have failures, there's no way to avoid it. Especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you're doing something new, of course there are gonna be mistakes. How can you not make mistakes? You don't know what you're going; it's unchartered territory.

You have to be doing something very different from what everybody else is doing, hopefully different from what's ever been done before - something that nobody's thought of yet.

No matter what I tend to be doing, generally people always think I'm crazy, first of all, because I'm always talking about things in the future that haven't happened yet, and people have a hard time believing what's gonna happen. Secondly, I'm almost always a contrarian, whatever direction everybody else is going in, I'm probably figuring out a way to go in a completely opposite direction.

I thought, 'Okay, what's going to be my edge, and how am I going to define what I'm doing differently?' Once I had that key idea of the software developer as an artist, once I had that idea, a whole bunch of other ideas flowed from that, because I realized that I need to go study the music industry, I need to study the book publishing and Hollywood and figure out how they do things, why they do them that way, and then I need to borrow, and rearrange, the things that they're doing to fit my industry so that I can invent and create this new industry.

You can't get anywhere without incredible passion, because if you're an entrepreneur, there's gonna be a lot of bumps in the road. A great artist has to do their art. There's nothing that can stop them from doing it. They just have to get it out there. It's the same thing for an entrepreneur. If you don't feel that way, then you're probably not really an entrepreneur.

Polygons are fashionable at the moment - particularly in the arcades.

If you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you're going to have to be somebody who can tolerate a high rate of change, you have to be willing to put a lot more hours into it, you have to tolerate the fact that you're going to make more mistakes and have a culture that responds to that.

If you look at any institution in history - look at the Roman Empire - anything in history, and what it looks like when it's peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it's not peaking? ... The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to - everything does.

[PlayStation 2] is a new canvas for humanity that takes us back to our nature.

[The PlayStation 2 is a] historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did.

One quality of entrepreneurship is just persistence, not giving up because you have road blocks and also not giving in because other people tell you that you're nuts. You are nuts and you should be proud of it. Stick with what you believe in.

You are nuts and you should be proud of it. Stick with what you believe in.