Trip Hawkins on Apple

With its tight control over the App Store, which has sold billions of game apps to date, Apple has asserted itself as a powerful gatekeeper in the rapidly growing sector of mobile game development. Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins – who worked as director of strategy and marketing for Apple in the early ‘80s – is intimately acquainted with Apple’s business philosophy.

At this year’s Gamelab conference in Barcelona, Hawkins spoke candidly to us for a full interview in our latest issue; here we present his thoughts about his thorny working relationship with Steve Jobs, his thoughts on Apple’s inevitable decline and the key to thriving in the App Store as a mobile game developer.

You talk a lot about the freedom developers enjoy working in social- and mobile game development but aren’t you simply beholden to new gatekeepers such as Apple and Facebook? You’re hardly considered a legitimate mobile developer unless your games are in the App Store.
Digital Chocolate’s games will always be in the App Store. But I think it would be an incredibly positive thing for the industry if Apple decided to support all of the web standards, because then Apple could be the best about everything. Right now they make a conscious choice. They want you to be in the App Store rather than the browser, so they cripple the browser. They’ve created this outlet and they had to have an excuse to keep you there, so they’re like, ‘Oh it’s nothing against Flash; we just prefer HTML5’. Well, Flash can actually make a really good game, and with HTML5 you can’t do that. But give HTML5 another few years to mature, and that could solve the problem. Or Apple could be more generous about deciding to support more de facto standards like Flash, or at least let it run its course.

It’s not uncommon to hear developers who make games for the iOS platform complain about being at the whims of Steve Jobs. How do you feel about that?
He used to be my boss, so I do know him well.

How do you answer those developers?
What you have to respect about Steve and about Apple is that they do actually make the best products. But then they have an attitude about saying, ‘Well, we’re the only manufacturer of this, and there’s only one right way of things working’. I think prosperity in media does not happen with any form of censorship, so for Apple to decide that they’re going to be the censors and decide how to do things and what you can and cannot do, it just doesn’t really work that well, because they still end up with a thousand farting applications.

The most important entity with an application on Apple is Facebook, and it’s the most broken thing you’ll ever see. You go to your news feed and half the things you touch won’t even load on your phone. Is that good for Apple? It all comes back to their determination to believe in their own philosophy. So Steve is very operatic – there are a lot of psycho-fans surrounding him, and a lot of people that want to work at Apple because they want to be part of it. The irony is that they’re like the audience in 1984. They want to be close to the power and associated with the success, but many of them refuse to challenge Steve, because you’ll just get your head cut off if you do that.

I had a very twisted relationship with Steve because I challenged him all the time. On one hand he needed that and he knew he needed it, but on the other hand he hated it and he didn’t want to see me get promoted because he didn’t want me to have any political power. He drove me out of the company partly because of that reason. I stayed longer at Apple than I expected, but I’d always planned to start my own game company – but he was very, very mad when I left, and he’s still mad. Not that he would ever admit it.

Have you spoken since?
Oh yeah, I’ve seen him. He’s a very difficult guy to be friends with, and he thinks of anyone who leaves as an act of permanent betrayal. You’re on the shit list for life. But he’s managed to make a great company. I honestly believe that Steve is the greatest CEO in history, because I know what he went through at Pixar. It’s such a remarkable transformation, and at the same time he’s rescuing Apple and everybody else thought it was dead. So I look at that and think, ‘Wow, he makes me look like a completely horrible, wretched person in comparison’.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s an amazing thing what he’s done with Apple, but if you want to be objective, it’s very close to peaking right now. If you look at any institution in history – look at the Roman Empire – anything in history, and what it looks like when it’s peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it’s not peaking? The CEO is still alive, let’s start there. They invented this tablet thing that’s going to be really big. They’ve done really well by reinventing the phone. They breathed new life into the Mac. They’ve got this super-high marketing. All these things are about as good as they ever can be – how much better can it really get?

The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to – everything does. Everything revolves so much around Steve, and no matter how good his lieutenants are, they’re not Steve. None of us is going to live forever, though I hope he lives for a really long time.

But you asked about developers and how they feel about the App Store platform. I think that if you really love a platform – it could be Apple, it could be Nintendo, it could be Facebook – and you’re really good at making things that are a perfect fit with the native programming requirements of that platform, then it’s okay to be on it and roll with the punches. You just have to get good at what that platform’s about, then you can survive. But if you want to be more successful, you have to be on more platforms, and you have to take a more open, democratic cross-platform stance.