"What that means initially is that you have alot of products that are only slightly better games in the same genre on another machine - and the titles that really take advantage of the machine come along later"
About this Quote
Trip Hawkins is giving away the awkward truth of every new platform launch: hardware arrives first, and imagination shows up on the second wave. The intent is practical, almost managerial. He is describing an adoption curve where early titles are “only slightly better” versions of what players already have elsewhere, because developers are still learning the tools, the architecture, and the market’s tolerance for risk. Porting is safer than inventing.
The subtext is a quiet warning to both consumers and investors not to confuse a platform’s potential with its launch library. Hawkins, a businessman who helped define modern game publishing, is also defending the messy middle: those early “good enough” releases aren’t a failure, they’re the tuition you pay for mastery. His phrasing implies a pipeline reality: studios ship what they can, not what the machine truly deserves, because time-to-market and cash flow beat experimentation.
Context matters here. Hawkins came up in an era when each new machine (and later, each new generation) demanded bespoke expertise. At launch, developers reuse engines, design habits, and even entire game structures built for older constraints. Only later do they stop treating the new hardware like a faster version of the old one and start exploiting its weirdness: new input methods, memory models, graphics tricks, online infrastructure. The quote works because it punctures hype with a veteran’s cynicism: innovation is rarely a day-one feature; it’s what survives after the ports, the compromises, and the learning curve.
The subtext is a quiet warning to both consumers and investors not to confuse a platform’s potential with its launch library. Hawkins, a businessman who helped define modern game publishing, is also defending the messy middle: those early “good enough” releases aren’t a failure, they’re the tuition you pay for mastery. His phrasing implies a pipeline reality: studios ship what they can, not what the machine truly deserves, because time-to-market and cash flow beat experimentation.
Context matters here. Hawkins came up in an era when each new machine (and later, each new generation) demanded bespoke expertise. At launch, developers reuse engines, design habits, and even entire game structures built for older constraints. Only later do they stop treating the new hardware like a faster version of the old one and start exploiting its weirdness: new input methods, memory models, graphics tricks, online infrastructure. The quote works because it punctures hype with a veteran’s cynicism: innovation is rarely a day-one feature; it’s what survives after the ports, the compromises, and the learning curve.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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