Do Consoles Stifle Innovation? Trip Hawkins Think So

How could having more choice possibly be stifling?

"I think we actually had our golden age when game development was using floppy disks and it was an open free platform when we could all make games like we wanted to make."

It's -still- called a PC and that still works the same, except now you can 'ship' your game to your customers in seconds, instead of days or weeks.

Anyone who thinks creativity has been stifled should take a good look at all the indie games recently. Steam has tons of games from developers that have never been heard of before and they're making some pretty amazing games. And they're cheap.

There are a lot of adjectives thrown around here that don't have sufficient explanation to say whether consoles are good or bad for innovation.

"I think we actually had our golden age when game development was using floppy disks..."

I'm guessing by this statement that when he says golden age, he's talking about new ideas and innovative game play.

"Nintendo came along and software licensing came in and we’ve been in a dark age since then."

So this must mean that the arrival of Nintendo and software licensing introduced restrictions that limited game innovation and "killed" gaming.

"...there are no great companies that have been built on the back of Nintendo."

So now we're on to great companies. Are great companies the same thing as great games? No doubt, great companies can make great games, but "great companies" can mean a lot of things. If you're talking from a business perspective, you might be talking about strong profits and a good pipeline. EA is living proof that you can build a "great company" where product innovation takes a back seat to a "re-hash and re-release" product cycle.

Plenty of companies found a way to build great games on the Nintendo platform. Particularly in the early days when the NES reigned supreme. Some of the best games ever made were built for that platform. The question of whether the companies that made them were "great" is irrelevant.

Fast forward to today, and I'd say we're about to come full circle. Yes, it is more difficult to gain access to a gaming platform like the XBox, Wii, or PS3, but they are huge markets with huge incentives. The Wii brought a whole new round of innovative game play concepts, and the Kinect is doing the same on the XBox platform.

In the end, whether or not console stifle innovation may not matter all that much. The internet and mobile devices are the new floppy. Anyone can build a game for Android. Developing for iOS costs you $99/year; hardly a high threshold. There are already billion dollar gaming industries built atop Flash-based gaming. As WebGL progresses, we'll see a whole new round of creativity well up.