What’s happened in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “Activision should man up and buy Take-Two.” — Asif Khan, analyst with Panoptic Management Consultants, on what Activision should do to make sure their sales numbers continue to look good.
QUOTE | “THQ is dancing on the edge of the abyss.” — Steve Peterson, West Coast Editor for IndustryGamers, translating THQ’s statements about their horrible third quarter losses and seeing what the company’s prospects look like.
STAT | 3 per cent — Amount game industry sales in the US dropped in January 2012 versus sales in January 2011, following December’s 21 per cent drop in sales.
QUOTE | “FIFA Ultimate Team could be as big as Call of Duty Elite alone.” — Peter Moore, EA COO, talking in an exclusive interview about EA’s digital content plans to keep one step ahead of Activision.
STAT | 18 per cent — Percentage of gamers in the US who regularly download games to their mobile devices, according to a new report from analyst firm Parks Associates.
QUOTE | “We are fundamentally pushing the whole game industry to go free-to-play.” — David Perry, CEO of Gaikai, on why streaming games will be great for the game industry in a number of ways.
QUOTE | “Chinese, Korean and Japanese developers are much, much better at making the next 10 years of games than we are.” — Gabriel Leydon, CEO of Addmired, noted this while saying that free-to-play games are going to take over from $US60 console games.
QUOTE | “It can be a bad thing.” — CD Projekt’s Adam Badowski, talking about the possibility of the Xbox 720 being able to ban used games.
QUOTE | “I would be happy to have more iOS titles priced around $US15.” — Emeric Thoa, The Game Bakers’ creative director, on why $US11.99 for the iOS version of the Dreamcast game SoulCalibur is a good price.
STAT | 12 per cent — Amount of Facebook’s revenue that comes directly from games, according to the filing that Facebook made with the SEC before their upcoming IPO.
STAT | $US2.2 billion — Amount of sales Japanese mobile social game company Gree expects to rake in for its fiscal year ending June 2012, with operating profits of more than $US1 billion.
This Week in the Business courtesy of IndustryGamers.com
Image: Shutterstock
AlphaOmega
Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 1:59 PMNo Activision should NOT buy Take-Two. If they buy one of the largest quality publishers in the industry, then we are essentially left with EA and Activision duking it out because THQ and Ubisoft aren’t as big as them, whereas Take-Two is somewhere in the middle.
[Razor]
Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 3:12 PMThis would mean that pretty much everyone would be playing for video games at a premium, not just Australia but the US too.
HH
Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 9:56 AMI doubt that… if they started charging games at a premium then another publisher who thought they could do it better and cheaper will rise up.
Plus how can you charge at premiums when 2 months later, nearly all games drop by 50 or 60 dollars. They still have to submit to the laws of supply and demand.
Banefire
Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 2:04 PMHell no! Activision can stay away from Take-Two thankyou very much!!
Take-Two has a very successful culture towards game development which would be destroyed should Activision take over. Activision needs to “Man up” and have its developers create new IP’s for itself and evolve, not steal the IP’s of others. If they dont have the talent to make a successful new IP or to than they have no business surviving. Dont go bleeding another studio dry to save yourself.
RandomSimsy
Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 10:31 PMIt would be a tragedy for Activision to buy Take Two. I do not want Activision running Take Two, all Activision cares about is COD and make a quick buck.
prashy
Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 11:59 AMIf Activision buy Take Two, they’ll be releasing new GTAs quite often. That’s not a good thing.
Franz
Monday, February 13, 2012 at 5:05 PMWhy the hell would this be a good idea? Activison have aspirations of becoming like EA, and they’re almost there. Le Dread!