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NVIDIA's Bea Longworth

On Android growth, desktop gaming versus mobile and console weakness

GamesIndustry.biz That Tegra roadmap you have until 2014, with the Stark architecture: You're claiming that will offer around 75 times the performance of the current Tegra 2: is that purely theoretical, or do you actually have that technology in a lab right now?
Bea Longworth

What we announced at Mobile World Congress and CES is pretty much all we have now, and for us it's fairly unusual to announce a roadmap. The first time we did it was at GPU Technology Conference last September, and that was our GPU roadmap rather than our mobile roadmap.

It's something that we wanted to do on the mobile side, really to cement our commitment here. People seem to still have such a strong association with NVIDIA on the graphics and the desktop gaming side of things. They still have this sneaking suspicion that we're just dabbling in mobile, we're just testing the water. With the roadmap we really wanted to make a statement that we have invested majorly in this: this is a huge part of our company.

This is what we're working on right now, and that goes out to 2014, so you can expect a lot more to come from us. Right now, obviously, the further into the future you get the more theoretical, as it were, the numbers become. Those are based on the work that our engineers are doing right now on future generations of the technology.

GamesIndustry.bizIf the current console generation doesn't change for, as many have predicted, another five years in the case of PS3 and Xbox 360, do you see Tegra-powered or other mobile devices catching up, or even overtaking them?
Bea Longworth

Yeah, I do. And already mobile gaming is hot on the heels of what you would expect from console-class gaming. We were demonstrating an Xbox 360 game running on our quad-core Project Kal-El technology demonstration at MWC. The gap is definitely closing, and that has always been the Achilles' heel of the console - its greatest strength is it's a stable platform, it's very much plug and play, you don't have to fiddle around with the hardware and have all the hassle that you might get from the PC.

But that's also its biggest disadvantage, the fact that they are static from one generation to another, and also that the technology can't improve. Whereas with other platforms like the PC and now mobile gaming, they will be constantly moving ahead. So it will be really, really interesting to see what console technology has to do in order to differentiate itself and stay ahead when it has to compete with a very mass-market mobile format instead of digging in its heels.

GamesIndustry.bizThe flipside of that, potentially, is that there could be an awful lot of fragmentation in mobiles and tablets if you guys - and presumably your competitors too - are pushing out new architecture every year or so. How much does that risk harming the market for Android games?
Bea Longworth

I don't think it does. You've already seen in the phone space Android is now extremely well-established and has a massive install base. The tablet side is still a work in progress as it were. Google Honeycomb hasn't been publicly released yet, so there's work there for developers in trying to ensure their apps are optimised for that. It will be interesting to see as those kinds of applications start to emerge how that will uptake the impact and the adoption of Android tablet devices.

It will be really interesting to see what console technology has to do in order to differentiate itself and stay ahead when it has to compete with a very mass-market mobile format

In terms of phones, the installed base in there and it's sort of a market that's undergoing a lot of changes right now. It's quite chaotic, but also there's a lot of opportunities for hardware companies like us, the manufacturers and also the developers. There's a choice to be made there by developers whether they want they want to go for the mass-market option, create something which caters to the lowest common denominator, can run on a very wide install base but is fairly basic, or whether they want to create something that it is optimised around high-end mobile hardware so potentially reaches a smaller install base but at the same time they can charge a premium for it.

We launched our Tegra Zone app for Android Marketplace a couple of weeks ago, which included a number of games which have been optimised for Tegra. We don't make any money from Tegra Zone ourselves, it goes through Marketplace, it's really just a way for people with Tegra devices to easily identify Tegra optimised content. But we did find that even though there was a premium on the prices for these games, they have been extremely popular and I think they actually topped the Android Marketplace in the charts in the US.

So that demonstrates that people are willing to pay a bit more for games which have added goodness on a higher-end platform. That has to be an absolutely beacon for developers, if they see that they can create content that people are willing to pay a premium for then that's very exciting for them.

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Alec Meer

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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.