Trip Hawkins: 'Hardcore iPhone games won't matter'

Apple may be planning to launch a $19.99 premium iPhone games section on its App Store, but Digital Chocolate boss Trip Hawkins thinks many iPhone owners won't care.

"I don't have a problem with the idea of having hardcore games on iPhone, or even having a category called Console or Hardcore," Hawkins tells PocketGamer.biz.

"But it's not going to matter. The reason: at least 95 per cent of iPhone users are not hardcore gamers, and they don't care about those brands. They're not looking to buy an expensive game on the iPhone and spend 40 hours playing it."

Instead, he sees more potential in the kind of accessible casual games that his own firm specialises in, and points out that its Crazy Penguin Catapult (pictured) has been reviewed by more than 100,000 App Store users, with a high average rating.

"We now represent 1 per cent of all the downloads that have ever happened on the App Store," he says.

With Apple having announced that more than 500 million apps have been downloaded from the store, that implies DChoc's two full games and two Lite demos have been downloaded more than five million times in total.

Hawkins also thinks iPhone IS a threat to the Nintendo DS' dominance of handheld gaming.

"I find myself smirking wondering what's going on in the boardroom at Nintendo when they think about what to do about the iPhone," he says.

For more on Hawkins's views on iPhone, console publishers, Android and the threat posed to Nintendo, read the full interview.

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