Aging & Wisdom Quote by Trip Hawkins

“Online console gaming will continue to grow at a healthy pace” is the kind of clean, investor-friendly prophecy that tells you as much about the speaker as the market. Trip Hawkins isn’t a mystic; he’s a veteran of the games business who helped build Electronic Arts and spent decades watching technologies turn into habits. The line reads like optimism, but its real function is reassurance: growth won’t be a chaotic gold rush, it’ll be “healthy” - steady, monetizable, and safe enough for platforms, publishers, and shareholders to plan around.

The word choice is doing quiet work. “Online” frames gaming less as a boxed product and more as a service, a relationship that persists after purchase. “Console” matters because it signals the walled garden model: controlled hardware, curated storefronts, recurring subscriptions, and predictable user behavior. Hawkins is implicitly betting on the power of frictionless networks to turn living-room entertainment into an always-on pipeline of engagement, and on the console makers’ ability to package that pipeline without scaring mainstream consumers.

Contextually, this kind of statement sits in the long pivot from cartridges and discs to ecosystems: Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, digital downloads, cross-play, season passes, and the slow normalization of paying not just for a game, but for access, identity, and continuity. The subtext is that “growth” isn’t merely more players; it’s deeper extraction per player through subscriptions, microtransactions, and platform lock-in. “Healthy pace” is the polite way to say: not a fad, not a bubble - a durable business model settling into place.