exceeded profit expectations and continues to make significant contributions to our overall financial performance.” — Square Enix’ head of studios Darrell Gallagher, explaining why the game is on its way to becoming the best-selling version in the franchise’s history.
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “There is a fear about it because the model is so different. I think that’s the elephant in the room that people aren’t talking about.” — Kabam president Andrew Sheppard, talking about the free-to-play business model and why “F2P is the most democratic form of development.”
QUOTE | “By removing itself from the pricing process on Steam, Valve has just made its platform hyper-competitive.” — Industry analyst Nicholas Lovell, talking about why Valve’s decision to let developers set their own prices will push the price of PC games to free.
QUOTE | “Now we think the software is good enough, it’s ready to be embedded in other people’s devices.” — Julie Uhrman, CEO of Ouya, talking about Ouya’s plans to spread its games and interface to other Android devices.
STAT | 1 million — Number of copies sold of Microsoft Studio’s RPG Dust: An Elysian Tail; the indie game was released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2012, and then came to Windows, Linux and Mac in 2013.
QUOTE | “When you’re in a meeting and someone says, ‘This feature is selling’ or ‘this game did X,’ just think to yourself, ‘Is this about the player?” — Robin Hunicke, co-founder of Funomena, talking about why game companies should make games for players, and not sales.
QUOTE | “We’ve really looked at what makes sense as a business model and what things were broken.” — OnLive general manager Bruce Grove, explaining how the streaming game service is re-inventing itself.”
STAT | 10 million — Number of registered players for Creaky Corpse’s MMO Dead Frontier; “That’s a moderately sized country right there,” said the game’s creator Neil Yates.
QUOTE | “If VR isn’t affordable it might as well not exist for most people.” — Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, talking about how the company is striving to keep the price of the VR headset as low as possible while still meeting the necessary specs.
STAT | 2.5 million — Number of credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi computers that have been sold in two years; the founders have launched a $US10,000 competition to run Quake III on the Linux device.
This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International
Image by Blue Sky Image [Shutterstock]
Comments
3 responses to “This Week In The Business: Oh, Tomb Raider Was A Hit.”
It’d be nice if it worked that way.
It’s kinda funny, though… I have to hand it to the people at Game Dev Tycoon. When playing that game, the only times I ever came away with games universally rated 10 and ultra-blockbuster were ones I had ignored the in-game tips on where the sliders should be, and simply adjusted them to where I felt they should be in the ultimate game I’d want to play.
Clever algorithms there. I was never able to bottle that lightning and just ‘repeat what worked’.
No, the fear is that with F2P you’re never getting a complete experience. The process is so skewed towards the money-making side of the business that the player ends up with forced, un-fun progression, or they have to pay an uncapped amount of money to win. If you took a F2P game and sunk as much money into it as you would a full-priced game, I’d say 9 time out of 10 you’re still going to get less enjoyment out of the F2P game.
See Diablo 3.
All F2P games that have micro transactions should only sell cosmetic items, different skins for the player and different skins for the weapons, nothing that alters the actual game play.