EA’s founder: web browsers are the future of gaming

Trip Hawkins, founder of EA and Digital Chocolate (a mobile gaming developer) recently gave his insights on the gaming industry in an interview with the folks over at Industry Gamers, and shared some very interesting points. According to him the future of games lies in web browsers, which are basically available to everybody right now. Be it on the desktop computer, on your smartphone, or even your connected TV; everybody who knows how to use a browser will be able to indulge themselves in their favorite games.

In addition to games being played online, he believes that the future of games will be free to play social games with virtual goods, where people can enjoy games for free or choose to spend money to enhance their experience if they want to. I guess we can see this happening already, with a lot of huge MMORPGs going free to play recently (DC Universe Online, Star Trek) as well as non-MMO games like Battlefield Heroes and Team Fortress 2.

Companies like Epic Games have announced that their gaming engines can run in a web browser through Flash, Crytek have mentioned considering that route as well and id Software already have Quake Live that runs in a browser – so there’s really going to be no more excuses for hardcore gamers to put down browser gaming anymore. However, it’s probably going to take awhile before all this technology is refined enough to replace “regular” games, so don’t expect anything so soon – it’s probably going to happen gradually.

Trip Hawkins believes that this change will probably happen over the next ten years, so until then we’ve still got a long time to enjoy your browser-free gaming. But if things continue going at this rate, we’ll probably see his predictions come true. What do you think? Do web browsers have the potential to replace regular games? Check out the full interview at the source link and sound off in the comments below.

George Wong
Categories: Gaming, Web
Tags: browser, EA, future