Interview

Trip Hawkins explains Digital Chocolate's move to PC

It's early stages, but the publisher has high hopes

Trip Hawkins explains Digital Chocolate's move to PC
Last week, mobile games publisher Digital Chocolate released four of its games as downloadable PC titles.

You can now buy Pyramid Bloxx, Rollercoaster Rush, WordKing Spelltris and Diamond Islands for $9.99 and play them on your computer, complete with beefed-up graphics and sound.

It seems a logical move, and possibly part of a trend where we start to get more multi-platform casual game publishers – think PopCap Games expanding to mobile, or I-play's new 'triple-play' strategy.

If you're making great original games, there's no reason why you shouldn't be looking to release them on mobile, web, PC, Xbox Live Arcade and so on.

Is this the theory behind Digital Chocolate's move to PC? I asked company founder Trip Hawkins, who explained it's as much about driving more sales of the company's mobile games.

"The web is a great way to promote original mobile games and to use classic internet methods to drive new customers to the retail decks of the mobile operators," says Hawkins. "The key to mobile market growth is new marketing methods and original content that brings new customers into the market."

Digital Chocolate (among others) has been trying to figure out how to attract these new gamers for some time now, with one example being its launch of Tower Bloxx as a Facebook application last year – it's since been installed by more than 780,000 users.

"Digital Chocolate has invested heavily in figuring out how to create social value and viral spread in the mobile ecosystem," says Hawkins. Besides Facebook, the publisher has had some success with WAP sites, text and MMS campaigns, and by including Get More Games links inside its mobile games.

"One of our important conclusions along the way was that we should also generate promotional synergy via the PC on the web," says Hawkins. "It has taken us a while to figure out how to do this, and so far we are in the early stages of building it out."

Having grabbed Pyramid Bloxx for PC the other day when it was released, I can testify that a) it works very well as a big-screen game, and b) there's a prominent link to get the mobile version, which could generate sales if people enjoy the PC version.

These PC games are also available as free trials, which Hawkins says is important, claiming that one of the reasons puzzle game Bejeweled has been such a big seller on mobile is because lots of people had played it as a free trial on the web (it's not a DChoc game – EA Mobile has the mobile rights).

"We feel like we can build original brands into mobile hits this way," he says.

"From the viewpoint of a mobile operator, it's all good. Either a customer that comes to the deck would now recognise and purchase our brands, or we would bring them directly to the operator's mobile purchase page from a trial on the web, that deep-links into the deck without the customer even having to know that the deck exists."

We continue to move towards being one big happy connected family, then. For us, one of the most exciting aspects of this approach is that far from luring people away from mobile gaming, it should in fact bring more more of them into the pocket gaming fold. And that's never a bad thing.
Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)