Trip Hawkins has a long legacy in video games, and he’s still making his voice heard in the industry as a new wave of change comes upon us.
Hawkins recently published his views on the imminent launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 console, which has raised hackles among fans who think it is too expensive. The Switch 2 is coming out at $449, and the best games like Mario Kart World will come out at $80.
But he noted, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, and Nintendo brands are not just for kids. Because of generational advances, many of the first generation of children who played on the NES are now in their 40s and 50s, and they have kids of their own. Because Nintendo has massive brands and happens to be one of the rare brands that appeal to all people of all ages, it might very well make sense to price the console for these groups, Hawkins said.
He noted that a Switch 2 is much cheaper than the standard price for an iPhone, and even a parent on a budget can rationalize it as something that will emotionally bond them with their children, who need the status of being able to say they have one on the playground, Hawkins said.
“I fully expect Switch 2 to exceed 100 million units sold in its lifetime, just like its predecessor,” Hawkins said. “This will be the fifth Nintendo platform to exceed 100 million (DS, Switch, GameBoy, Wii, Switch 2) and every one of these has been family-oriented. Sony’s PS1, PS2 and PS4 are the only others in history to sell this well.”
By contrast, he noted the Steam Deck is a reasonable success even though it has only sold four million units over the last two years, in a world that now has seven billion smartphones, two billion PCs and two billion smart TVs. This platform has no chance of ever reaching an installed base of 100 million, as almost all the game content is also available on all the other platforms (including anything any software publisher might want to license, like a sports league, who will demand being on all platforms), and Nintendo is going to dominate market share among children. Hawkins thinks anyone else is going to have a hard time challenging Nintendo in its stronghold of hybrid portable-home consoles.
I talked to Hawkins about his essay and other views of the modern game industry. It’s nice to hear the view of someone who was there at the beginning. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: What was it that inspired you to write the editorial?
Trip Hawkins: Obviously I’m still heavily involved in the game industry. I have several regular clients I work with every month. I pay attention to trends and news events. I found myself thinking about the launch of the Switch 2 and noticing what people were saying, or thinking. Various ideas started to appear in my head.
GamesBeat: What was point one for you in the observations that were most interesting?
Hawkins: The funny thing–I have a long, tortured relationship with Nintendo. I’m not terribly thrilled that they invented the business model that dominates now, where platform fees upfront tear the heart out of the software industry. But nevertheless, they have been around a long time as a company. They’re older than any other video game company in history, going back to their card game days. It’s remarkable that they’ve had more bestselling pieces of competing hardware than these other big, famous brands like Sony and Xbox and so on. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Nintendo, and in particular the great exclusive first-party game brands they have.
Anyway, thinking about the Switch 2, I found myself realizing that this is going to do really well. We’re now more than 40 years into–or you could say even longer than that. Donkey Kong came out in the late 1970s, the first appearance of Mario. They’ve been at it now for almost 50 years. They’re not perfect. They’ve occasionally laid an egg with a new hardware platform. But the combination of their fantastic exclusive brands that fans have grown up with–they never get tired of those, even when they transition to adulthood. That’s something I’ve always been aware of. There aren’t many brands outside of Nintendo – Star Wars is an example – where you can acquire a loyal customer as a child and then have them be with you as a paying customer for the rest of their life.
Disneyland, the theme park business, that’s another example. Harry Potter for a while was a prominent example that’s kind of faded. It’s a hard thing to do, and Nintendo has multiple brands like that with Mario, Zelda, Pokemon and so on. Those exclusives can drive hardware sales. The other thing I found myself noticing–I was still a young person when I first played with Nintendo. Now my children have grown up with Nintendo platforms. Some of them are about to start having families of their own. We’re multiple generations into this. The Nintendo brands are the ones best able to span generations.
I was triggered by one of the recent articles that said–some industry experts and consumers are complaining about the hardware and software prices. They were going to be higher than some people were hoping for. And yet if you think about it, these are fairly inexpensive toys for an adult. If an adult happens to have a child, then it’s going to be a shared activity with the child. This is where the Switch design–you can think of it as a mobile device, but you can also run it through a big screen and have a better joystick, have more of a console experience. That duality the Switch is known for fits this emerging market of multi-generational families that are playing together.
GamesBeat: Magid, the analyst firm, they did a nice report that showed how smartphones were the new Nintendo. They were the place where young people were first starting to learn how to play. That used to be Nintendo.
Hawkins: It’s true.
GamesBeat: Now they’ve lost that.
Hawkins: Even as a baby–a baby that’s only a few months old figures out pretty fast that Mom’s phone is the most powerful thing in the world. They want to get their hands on it. It doesn’t take long at all for them to figure out how to use it. The user interface in a smartphone is so simple and intuitive. Whereas if you look at historic Nintendo products, other than Game Boy, you had to have a kid get to be maybe at least four before you’re going to turn them loose with a joystick. Otherwise they’re going to be frustrated and complaining a lot. But you have a lot of mobile games now, or whole game categories like idle games, where you’re just tapping. You can’t really lose. Match three is another one like that.
GamesBeat: I think that was why Nintendo also–they have their feet in mobile now. They continue to make mobile games.
Hawkins: Doesn’t that seem like a good echo chamber? You have billions of smartphones. The Nintendo brand now has a presence there. For anybody that discovers their inner gamer on one of their parents’ phones, they’re going to start getting interested in having their own platform. It’s potentially cheaper for a family to get a Switch 2 for a kid than get them a smartphone prematurely, along with a phone plan. That gives the opportunity for the kid to have a parallel track, and the adults can have the parallel track as well. A lot of adults love those Nintendo brands.
GamesBeat: With the latest Nintendo Switch 2, I wonder whether they were addressing the right things or not. In some ways it feels like they’re trying to counter the threat from Valve’s Steam Deck. They don’t want to just offer a less powerful Steam Deck. Some of their design may have been reactive to that. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. It doesn’t seem like a big target to go after.
Hawkins: I agree. I think it’s probably more to do with the fact that if the Switch doesn’t evolve fast enough, it starts to look pretty dodgy compared to whatever the latest consoles and high-end PC game rigs are. They don’t want to look like they’re too childish, too cartoony compared to whatever’s the state of the art. Also, from a business perspective, you’re going to be wondering–okay, how long do we squeeze what we already have? But if you wait too long, the product in the market starts to look pretty old.
GamesBeat: There are things about it that aren’t so Nintendo-like. The price is pretty high. They’ve been able to get some of these machines out for much lower prices before.
Hawkins: If you want to put that in perspective, $99 has always been a mass-market price point. When any console got down to that, you were doing really big volume. But looking back over 40 years, $99 in the 1980s would equate to around $500-600 now because of inflation. I remember noticing this in the history of consumer electronics. The VCR came out at a price over $1000. If you adjust that number for inflation, it would be more like $8000 or $10000. Yet it became a mass-market product. It didn’t fail.
That’s one of the reasons I started 3DO. I thought it could be a multiplayer. It could do all these different things. Maybe I could get the buyer to think of it more like a VCR or a hi-fi system that they’re accustomed to spending $500 or $1000 on. Of course gamers don’t look at it that way, and so it didn’t work.
GamesBeat: The interesting threat now also comes from this other direction. Disney’s CEO pointed this out when he invested in Epic. Bob Iger put $1.5 billion into Epic. He explained that one of his guys came to him with a deck showing that Disney was not reaching the youngest generation right now – Gen Z, Gen Alpha. In one generation, that means Disney is gone. Something has happened to change what entertainment people have in front of them. Now it’s Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. If you’re not on those platforms as a brand, you’re not reaching the ideal audience, that young audience. Nintendo, I think, can also see this. They have to be relevant to that audience in some way, or else in one generation their brand is no longer as strong as it was. There’s been that disruption between generations around what kind of content people consume.
Hawkins: To put that in context, we still live in a world where a movie is about two hours long. Obviously the TV industry has built on that with these shows that are delivered as a series with tons of episodes, so it’s quite a bit more lucrative. But what has happened with conventional formats like films is that the families that have kids, they’re still going to show the Disney films to their kids. Kids will still want to go to theme parks. That’s not going to change. It’s just that you can burn through that catalog in a matter of weeks. For certain kids of certain ages, they’ll see some of those films 100 times. But by contrast, there’s a bottomless, infinite number of hours they can put into a game. Because you’re interacting with it, there’s a lot more at stake. You’re the hero. You’re not just projecting yourself onto the hero on a screen. If the game is good enough, you might never get tired of it. You don’t mind the repetition.
Going back to the beginning of human culture around games, digging pits in the ground and using beans, societies have certain slots available for different kinds of social activities. That includes games. You’ll notice, for example, in Japan they don’t worship chess. They worship go. In Europe it’s the other way around. What does that mean? It means that if you have a turn-based strategy board game like chess or go, your culture has room for one of those. Now, if you shift to a deck of cards, your culture has room for a standardized card deck that can play several games, but there’s probably going to be three or four really dominant games like poker and bridge that are highly social. Then of course if you talk about physical games that you watch on TV or play in real life, like tennis or golf, the list is not very long until you’ve filled out all the boxes that the culture and the society need.
With video games we’ve expanded beyond that. We’re simulating different aspects of life or different aspects of fantasy and science fiction. It’s a bit more of an infinite set of possibilities. New genres keep getting invented and developed. These game designs are often open worlds. Now that you have AI helping you, you can have an infinite number of levels or maps and so on. It really is gradually becoming virtual reality.
It’s a scary thing, because–look, I have four kids. I would be concerned if any of them spent too much time playing games. You can just disappear in there. I don’t think any of us planned or anticipated, from long ago, that game addiction would be a thing, but it obviously is now. I did always feel, as a parent, that it was important to manage what media your kids are consuming. I was shocked when I would discover from other parents that they were letting their seven-year-old play Call of Duty. Some really inappropriate choices. It was very surprising. Of course the kids are going to aspire to do what the older kids and adults around them are doing. They’ll figure out how to get their hands on it. But as a society we’d probably be better off if we began to think about how we blend games into society as a whole, and how to make sure that’s more healthy. There are all these different ways over the last decade or two that we’ve diverged from that, including online hate and various other forms of bad behavior on the internet.
To some degree it depends on the game. A game can teach really valuable things. Potentially that gets to replace conventional curricula in school. First world reality, at some point, is going to be competing effectively with the real world. Once COVID started, the virtual world had a big advantage over the real one. It doesn’t have that any longer, at least for the moment. But you can see already that younger generations have a bias toward the virtual world that didn’t previously exist.
Bob Iger was maybe–it’s difficult to get everybody to spend all their time looking at passive video. Sitting there watching a screen and listening. Games, because they’re interactive, it’s a fundamentally different thing than all the other media types. You can’t help but grow new neurotransmitter connections and speed up the growth of new brain cells if you’re interacting with the environment. Humans are born to do that. It’s a question of how you direct that. How do you create it? How do you make it good for humanity instead of being a problem?
When Gutenberg invented the printing press, I don’t know if he was philosophical about it or not, but you think about how someone like Martin Luther–he spent three years hiding in a castle rewriting the Latin Bible in German. That was going on around the same time the press was invented. Pretty soon you had the German Bible as the first version the public could get their hands on in Germany. These are incredible, amazing breakthroughs you get with new media, with media in general when someone puts it to a good use. Of course maybe there are atheists that would call that a bad use. These are things not everyone always agrees on. But it’s part of how we evolve and figure out how to survive.
What we do around media has become a bigger and bigger part of life. You can compare it to when we were first born. My parents and grandparents, they could listen to the radio. They could walk to the one movie theater in town. Of course they could read books. Going back to Gutenberg, there are going to be some bad people like Hitler writing Mein Kampf and printing that off. Anyway, I certainly hope the industry, over time, becomes more thoughtful and responsible around the social impact of games. But it’s great to have games to be the heartbeat.
GamesBeat: And that’s what you were trying to do with IF… That’s still a piece of unfinished business.
Hawkins: There are still opportunities for products like that. That product suffered from the mindset that a lot of parents had, that this is just something to keep a kid busy. There’s so much free stuff out there, so why should you pay for anything? The attitudes in the industry have evolved since then. There’s quite a bit more free-to-play gamers now that will spend money in a game in the first session, or the first couple of days, because they want to stress test the game. “I’m probably not going to understand if I want to spend time on this unless I spend some money to see what I can do with it.”
GamesBeat: Someone who was thinking many years ahead on user-generated content once said that the big entertainment companies are going to get disrupted, and it was going to be through the combination of UGC and AI. Players can create games for themselves, and they’re going to enjoy them even if the big entertainment companies can make something better. What do you think about that kind of grand prediction, that UGC is going to be the thing that survives because of AI?
Hawkins: UGC is incredibly valuable. It gets people involved in creating a more interesting identity for themselves in the gaming space. This content generation–you can look at a couple of somewhat more mundane media platforms or data types, like email. It’s all UGC. I’m going to have to type out some sentences and hit send. That’s what I create. Someone’s going to create something else and reply to me. If you look at music, people like to listen to recorded music, but there are millions of talented musicians and singers and songwriters. Human beings couldn’t possibly have enough time in their lives to listen to every song that’s ever been published. Again, there’s a lot of UGC in music whether you publish or not. A lot of people learn how to play an instrument and play for their own entertainment at home. There are obviously starving artists that maybe have a day job and do a little busking on the side, just because their passion is music.
User-generated content is so important to a social life. We’re all trying to build social status and be recognized and be viewed as successful. Those are human instincts that we’re stuck with whether we like it or not. Being able to personalize and customize and represent yourself in the way you feel like representing yourself–I remember the early days of MMOs, where half of your customer base were men and the other half were men pretending to be women. I’m somewhat joking here, but there was a lot of that going on. A lot of the guys that were playing thought, “What the heck, I’ll see what happens.” And then of course we started to have more women players.
I remember that first MMO, Meridian 59, back in the mid-’90s. It was a vicious, nasty game. The players were killing each other. Death was everywhere. And then some of the players, on their own–you think about how primitive the internet was back then in terms of the quality and speed of transmission, the reliability of connections. The graphics weren’t that great. The equipment was expensive. Next thing we knew, the male and female avatars were starting to have relationships in the game, even though it had nothing to do with the game, and it would likely just increase their odds of getting killed. Then they decided they wanted to have their avatars get married, so they’d go to one of the biggest rooms in the dungeon and invite all their favorite avatars. Everyone shows up for the ceremony. They’d have guards to make sure that some other guild didn’t try to come and create another Red Wedding.
Again, humans, we’re so completely built out of narrative. I can say one word to you, and if it’s not a complete story, your brain is immediately going to ask, “What’s the story?” We’re built out of stories. The people playing that game, they weren’t satisfied with the game’s designed story. They wanted to create their own stories that were much more personal. Then what really blew my mind, the people behind the avatars would get married in real life and have children. This is, again, 30 years ago. Here’s this horrible, vicious shooter game with player-killing and everyone always upset. It was a toxic place. And yet actual life is going to emerge from it because of the social desire, the social power of it.
That’s the root story of UGC. Letting people tap into their creativity. Every game is creative. We all want to express ourselves. We all have a secret desire to have other people know us. You have to be vulnerable and creative and put yourself out there.
GamesBeat: Coming full circle on the Nintendo conversation, we’ve talked about the advantages Nintendo has, and also the vulnerabilities. How do you think it’s going to work out for them in this generation of consoles, and what’s your long-term view of Nintendo? Which of these different signals seem most telling? Smartphones, for example, are the way that kids learn how to play games now, instead of Nintendo. But they’re carrying forward some of the great advantages of the Switch. The Switch 2 is possibly going to extend those.
Hawkins: It’s true that the billions of smartphones mean that’s the entry point for future humans, their first computer devices. But I think it ends up being a gateway to supply more customers to Nintendo. Nintendo customers are going to be nurtured by their parents, who were Nintendo customers themselves. The degree to which a kid becomes an owner of a Nintendo platform has to do with their parents and grandparents now. If any of those people had one, they’re probably going to get introduced to it and think it’s pretty cool.
GamesBeat: There’s still some intergenerational influence there.
Hawkins: That could very easily survive. I don’t see why–some of this depends on what happens to Nintendo and how their strategies may change. But I remember previously when it was clear that it was really expensive to make consoles. You lose a lot of money on the front end. I looked at how Sega was struggling. When they decided to get out of hardware and just do software, I thought that was a smart move. For a while I thought Nintendo maybe had to do that as well. But Nintendo’s first-party brands create a unique situation. Nobody else has that collection of brands. To maintain that collection they have to be original IP that you own. It can’t be a license that can ever expire. They have that.
Sega was never really focused on by young children. Sonic was a great invention at the time because they needed a younger positioned game to go with the higher price point of the 16-bit machine compared to the Nintendo machine with the famous Nintendo brands. Sonic was a good flanking move that helped the Sega Genesis. But as you know, a lot of the revenue on the Genesis was older players, teenagers and young adults that wanted to play the sports games. EA dominated that segment of the market. If EA had never touched the Genesis, it might have had a lot less market share than it did.
Sega never really had what Nintendo has always had. By having this tight grip on pre-teen children, and then knowing that the brands appealed to parents and grandparents that also grew up with these famous brands–as long as you keep that exclusive, you have the capacity to recapture every generation well into the future. You maybe can’t let your technology get so far behind that it’s antiquated and stops being as functional or as appealing. But that’s not really a problem.
GamesBeat: They do have some vulnerability in that area of Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. Does Nintendo face a threat from that? Or do you think other companies may face a bigger threat?
Hawkins: First of all, if you look at these things and prototypes of the metaverse, you can talk about Fortnite creative, you can talk about Minecraft, you can talk about Roblox. Those are the three biggest ones. None of them are exclusive to a platform. They’re on all the platforms. They’re not directly threatening to a company like Nintendo that’s trying to sell a specific platform and uses exclusive titles on it. That gives Nintendo an advantage that no one else has. None of the other platforms have that spectacular first-party catalog. A lot of the games that are attractive to PlayStation or Xbox players are also available on the PC. Nintendo has this unique thing with these potent exclusive brands, and they dominate that age range they have. It sets up a different set of requirements or rules that they have to operate around to keep that going.
Going back to what you said about Minecraft, it would be smart at this point for Nintendo to offer an open-world creative platform like Roblox. I think of these as creator-consumer economies. Do you remember Will Harvey’s thing called There? That was one of the first ones. And then of course there was Second Life. Those were attempts that were maybe too early. But they were demonstrations that a certain percentage of players are really creative. They’re going to be able to build stuff that other people will like. They can build an economy. There will be consumers showing up to pay for things and creators who make those things. That’s a nice flywheel.
Nintendo has the potential to build products like Minecraft and build out these kinds of creator-consumer things, using their brands to facilitate that. Take something like Pokemon, for example. It already presents a natural fit with the several hundred kinds of Pokemon, the different kinds of maps and terrain. You can see how that would work. Animal Crossing is another one that has incredible popularity across multiple generations. It’s sold really well. It has the creative side and the economic side. It’s not hard for Nintendo to expand into being a competitor with things like Roblox. I don’t want to understate how big and strong Roblox is. It’s not like it’s trivial to go toe to toe with them. But again, Nintendo has their own platform. They’re protected in their safe harbor.
GamesBeat: What do you think about the Madden film?
Hawkins: It’s such a weird thing. I heard about it around eight months ago. I had a conversation with the director. For what it’s worth, he’s a very famous, accomplished director. A bit of a character. I thought, “Maybe I can help them get the historical details right.” They had no interest in having me be involved in any way. Eight months went by when I heard nothing, so I didn’t know if the project was moving forward. The fact that there’s this brand-new news, that it’s about to go into production–it looks like they have the money lined up and they’re filling out the roster of the key actors. It’s not one of those things you dream about as a kid. “I wanna grow up and see a movie about me where a famous celebrity plays me in the movie.” It’s not a childhood fantasy.
GamesBeat: It tells you that you lived a life that’s interesting to a lot of people out there, I think. You’re still living it. It’s a nice recognition.
Hawkins: Do you remember the film Silver Linings Playbook? Bradley Cooper is a young man who’s bipolar. He has a challenging relationship with his father. He meets Jennifer Lawrence, and I forget exactly what’s going on with her, but they’re both kind of broken toys. It’s a very emotionally relevant, emotionally moving film, but it’s also really funny. There’s really good humor around some deep, serious issues that these people are having. That’s one of the things I like about the work of David O. Russell, the director. He manages to pull that off a lot. Anyway, I’m figuring that my character in the film–the guy playing me is a comedian, right? It’s easy to predict that he’s going to be the court jester in this storyline and provide some comic relief.
There are some interesting trends happening in the industry. The world’s really screwed right now. Economics are screwed up. It’s hard to raise money. It’s a tough time for the industry. But I look at a whole variety of things, including cross-play, creator-consumer economies like we talked about, the evolution of products to be more and more like a metaverse–by the way, I don’t think a metaverse has to be wearing a bodysuit and having a thing that flips you upside down and inside out. It can be a lot more convenient than that and still be mass-market, still have a lot of the things you’d want if you read Snow Crash.
The most interesting things that my clients are doing go beyond cross-play to embrace browser games, which kind of automatically gives you cross-play. They’re also selectively using web3 features. Just trying to evolve more sophisticated economic thinking. It’s obvious that free-to-play games are here to stay. It’s just a question of how you get players more motivated to engage and spend money, because as you probably know, I’d say the average mobile game–if they get 100 installs today, they’re going to have two paying customers and 98 that never pay. That’s kind of an indictment of the industry, that so many people think this stuff’s not worth paying for. There are ways to make the whole experience so much more meaningful. For example, giving your digital collectibles more economic value, allowing you to be more industrial in terms of what you do with them.
It feels like what we need to do with the virtual world, in terms of economic behavior, is make it more like the real world. When I go out in the real world I take my credit cards with me. I’m prepared to engage in commerce. You really only do that if you want to engage in commerce, if you know that there will inevitably be good reasons to do so. A lot of games today don’t give you that reason, and so people don’t spend money. If we were in a real metaverse, almost everyone would think, “Shoot, I should set up a payment method. I should be prepared to engage in commerce.” It’ll be like going out in the real world.
If you look at the game industry being worth a few hundred billion dollars now, where 98 percent of the typical mobile game isn’t generating any payment–if you had half of the people coming to the metaverse spending money, that would be a 25 times increase in the paying player rate. That would make the industry worth trillions of dollars. I think that’s absolutely going to happen.
GamesBeat: You mentioned you’re advising some companies. Can you talk about who they are and the spaces they’re in?
Hawkins: I work with a company called GFAL. They’re the client I’m the most involved with. I helped them get going and do some of their fundraising. I have a lot of monthly contact with various people at the company. These are guys I worked with at Digital Chocolate, because we had an office in Barcelona. Some of them later ended up having big roles at King leading the Candy Crush product. They’re very talented people, good people, really fun to work with.
They’re the ones that, around the time at GDC, started the beta of a game called Diamond Dreams. It’s trying to create a very new thing around virtual luxury. You get diamonds from playing the game and use the diamonds as payments that help you craft really gorgeous jewelry, really brilliantly animated with some clever technical methods. It’s not like you can literally reach into the screen and grab a necklace and put it on and wear it to the Met Gala, but we want you to feel that way. For me it goes back to EA in the beginning – can a computer make you cry? Can we make you feel like you’re at the Met Gala? I’m convinced that the human imagination is going to help us get there. Particularly if whatever’s digital has some degree of tangible associated with it. There can be scarcity. There can be value. There can be function. That’s a playbook that everyone is still trying to develop.
I also work with the founders of Kixeye. You probably remember them. They were in San Francisco. The three key guys, or I might say four or five key guys, are still together. They sold Kixeye to Stillfront a while back. I was on the board of Kixeye. We spun out a new company called Global Worldwide that made this game called Kingdom Maker. It’s a 4X game, and it’s a pretty remarkable game in terms of its feature set. The metrics, the retention and monetization–I’ve always been a big fan of the game, but it’s been hard for them to raise money to scale the business. They were in a publishing deal for a while that kind of went sideways. That’s delayed things. But again, really good guys, really good game.
I’m working with a company called Jadu. They’re one of the more intriguing, innovative AR companies. They don’t have a major product out, but they have one that’s doing some testing right now. I also work with Zibra.ai. This is a Ukraine-based company that develops AI tools that can be used in the development process, but also in real time to generate certain kinds of visual special effects, like smoke and fire. Have you looked into the difference between making something in development with AI versus having it created in real time? It’s a real game-changer to do it in real time. There’s certainly plenty of game development companies benefiting from using AI tools, but if you can shrink the code base that does whatever thing and fit it into a chip–just the idea that you can get some of this stuff into the gaming code so that it’s executing in real time from memory, or it’s actually part of another chip that’s built into your machine.
Zibra has generated a lot of interest among the hardware makers and the operating system companies. They’re very attracted to the possibilities of doing more of this in real time. I think it has a great future. It ties into how we all benefit from Moore’s Law. It’s always useful to look over the next five or 10 years and say–we know that chips are going to get faster, cheaper, more dense. There’s going to be more addressable memory. So what does that mean? Realtime AI is one example of what it means.
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