AppNation 2011: Trip Hawkins: The browser will beat the app store

"I've never seen things changing as quickly as now," says Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, now CEO of social and mobile gaming publisher Digital Chocolate, giving the keynote talk at the AppNation 2011 conference.

"There's a lot of disruption happening. It used to be that 100 million people was the biggest audience we could address as a games company, whereas now it's over one billion."

Pointing to change across the industry, he highlighted to many opportunities and challenges.

"There's been a collapse in the traditional value chain with app stores removing publishers and retailers," Hawkins says.

"But there are still problems such as discoverability. For every Angry Birds, there are 1,000 angry developers whose games didn't get found."

This is one of the key reason that Hawkins thinks the web will eventually overcome app stores.

"The browser will beat the app store," he argues. "It's more convenient, it's driven by search and it's more viral for consumers. It doesn't matter what device your friend has."

Another key reason is that the browser - notably the new features enabled by HTML5 - opens up a global audience and solve many fragmentation issues.

"All technologies start as silos, but get 100 times bigger when they become inter-operable; think about roads or text messaging," Hawkins explains.

He also thinks this trend plays into the hands of big companies such as Facebook, Android and - of course - Google.

"They are all based on the browser not apps," he says.

"This process will continue, particularly with tablets over the next couple of years as you get browser standardisation and high market penetration. I expect one billion tablets to be sold in the next five years.

"Facebook has had over 100 million installs of its apps, but it's telling its developers to spend time serious thinking about HTML5."

"The browser is permanently free, permanently open and freely democratic. You can use search and display ads and it's easy to cross promote and easy to update content."

It's a similar situation in terms of taking game development global.

"If you can't compete with a studio of 10 guys in China, you are going to get destroyed," he argues.

"You need to be doing your development globally, both in terms of cost structure and to satisfy cultural differences. But you also need to be able to share your learnings between these groups."