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NVIDIA's Bea Longworth

On Android growth, desktop gaming versus mobile and console weakness

GamesIndustry.biz So you don't follow the argument many have made that the necessary future of mobile gaming is incredibly cheap or even free to play?
Bea Longworth

I think that there will always be room for both. There will be always the extremely addictive, basic, Angry Birds-style game where people don't mind having a few adverts on the screen and you play for just five minutes at a time. But there will also increasingly be a segment that it is a more immersive type of mobile gaming, where people are willing to pay a premium to get that better experience and enhanced gameplay.

GamesIndustry.biz How confident are you that Android tablets can compete with the iPad, in the same way that Android phones have been able to eclipse iPhone?
Bea Longworth

It will be really interesting to see what happens. Right now Apple seem to have scored a bit of a goal with the iPad 2 - the performance is better than anyone could have expected. It's probably knocked some of the manufactures for six with the achievements that they've made with that device. Apple is always a fantastic innovator in terms of creating categories; they created the tablet category, and made it a credible buyer's category.

Before that people were quite sceptical about tablets: 'what is this thing, why do I need one?' They did the same with the iPhone - before that people were extremely sceptical about smartphones being a major category. When Apple came up with the concept of the App, it suddenly became clear to people why this device was going to be massive, and it has proved to be so and there have proved to be numerous imitators.

Tablets will probably never be quite as big a market as phones - phones are so ubiquitous that it's always going to be the biggest mass market, but I do think that there's absolutely room for the tablet sector to grow a great deal. Also potentially to be more innovative and ahead of the curve. There is that additional freedom with Android for hardware and software manufacturers, whereas Apple tends to be much more of a walled garden. It's definitely going to be interesting to see the battle develop.

GamesIndustry.biz Would NVIDIA kill to be in Apple's iPads and iPhones?
Bea Longworth

Well, Apple's also a great partner for us on the desktop, but in terms of the mobile business they do use their own chips. They acquired a company a few years ago which does their SoC solutions and they've made it very clear that for the foreseeable future they intend to keep that side of things in-house. Obviously we would love to work with them, and we'll never close any doors as it were, but right now we're really delighted with the partners that we have.

Going forwards it'll be really exciting to see what Android Honeycomb does on public release - that will start to appear on a lot more devices and it'll be great to see how different manufacturers implement the features that are there and in the Tegra architecture as they bring new things to market.

GamesIndustry.biz How important to you is the recent announcement that the next version of Windows will support system on a chip devices?
Bea Longworth

Yes, that is really, really exciting for us. Essentially the announcements that were made at CES... We announced what we call Project Denver, which is that we are licensing ARM technology to create an NVIDIA CPU which we can integrated with our GPU technology. With the Windows announcement, that Windows will be able to run on ARM-type CPU platforms, it just kind of blows everything wide open.

We didn't say a great deal about what we were going to do, but I think it really got everybody's brains spinning on the implications of it. Your solution of choice doesn't have to be x86 anymore, and we're not just talking about mobile devices - it's every type of computing device, from PCs to servers to supercomputers, this sort of ARM-based solution becomes very attractive.

GamesIndustry.biz What will be the impact of that on PC games?
Bea Longworth

To be honest, it's not really something that we've gone into a lot of detail yet. I'm sure we will be thinking and talking a lot more about that side of things as Project Denver develops, but right now what we've announced is all fairly high level, so I can't really talk without going into wild speculation.

Bea Longworth is NVIDIA Senior Corporate and Tegra PR manager. Interview by Alec Meer.

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Alec Meer: A 10-year veteran of scribbling about video games, Alec primarily writes for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but given any opportunity he will escape his keyboard and mouse ghetto to write about any and all formats.
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