While Roberts acknowledges that "there are cool things you can do on mobile," he also questions the wisdom of abandoning traditional platforms for it.
If you think about Angry Birds --Rovio, right?-- it's the biggest outlier in the history of gaming. I mean, they've had a billion downloads. Last year, they did $100 million in revenue, and of that, $30 million was licensing. So they actually did $70 million in revenue off their core business, which is mobile. And they're an order of magnitude bigger than [other mobile developers] in terms of single-game sales.Roberts goes on to explain how he believes that new trends can co-exist with traditional models, but he also points out the inherent limitations that bother him as a gamer. "For me, the analogy is I can watch Dark Knight Rises on my iPhone, but do I want to? I want to go see it on a big-ass IMAX screen. I'm into games because I like to have that immersion. And I just can't do it on a mobile [device], and I can't do it on a Facebook game."
You compare and contrast that with, say, Call of Duty that does $1 billion every year. It's doing well over 10 [times] what [Rovio] is doing. Now, there aren't one billion downloads of Call of Duty, but people pay $60 [each] for it. And you've got World of Warcraft, and plenty of other things that are doing around $500 million, like Madden or Battlefield. What that tells you is that the core gamer is willing to pay for the premium experience.
