This Week In The Business: Reality Warp

This Week In The Business: Reality Warp

QUOTE | “It will be hard to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s virtual around you.” — Noah Falstein, Google’s Chief Game Designer, talking about the future of virtual reality and augmented reality for games.

Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “‘Christ, we’ve only got 10 days to go and we’ve got to make £100,000, for f**k’s sake, let’s just say anything.’” — Veteran designer Peter Molyneux, explaining what he thinks a desperate developer might say to get a Kickstarter funded — and why he thinks Kickstarters done early in the development process are dangerous.

QUOTE | “If you look across all titles launched on the new generation platforms, including Sony and Microsoft, as well as portable, there are 19 games that have at least an 85 Metacritic Score and a User Score of 8.5 or better. Nintendo made 17 of those games.” — Scott Moffitt, EVP of sales & marketing at Nintendo of America, talking about why Nintendo’s fans are better than other console fans.

QUOTE | “The utter magic of the direct-sales digital marketplace… is being forgotten and the stinking arthritic carcass of the old industry is crawling back to truss us up all over again.” — Barry Meade of Fireproof, talking about F2P versus premium games and why developers must concentrate on making unique games.

STAT | 15 per cent — Amount that the number of viewers for the League of Legends World Championship declined this year, down to 27 million from 32 million last year; however, concurrent viewers rose from 8.7 million to 11.2 million, and average viewing time rose from 42 minutes to 67 minutes.

QUOTE | “We’re indifferent, because we can’t choose how a consumer wants to consume. We need to be everywhere.” — Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, explaining why the company is agnostic about digital distribution.

STAT | 53 per cent — Percentage of console sales the Xbox One claimed on Black Friday, according to more than 180,000 receipts collected by InfoScout; the PlayStation 4 came in second with 31 per cent, and the Wii U was a distant fourth with six per cent.

QUOTE | “If we were going to partner with somebody… we were thinking the whole time that we wouldn’t partner with Microsoft or Sony.” — Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, explaining that he doesn’t think the Oculus headset should be tied to existing consoles.

QUOTE | “I think our history with acquisitions is somewhat marginal in performance.” — Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgenson, explaining why EA isn’t looking for big acquisitions but instead will focus on creating great products in-house.

QUOTE | “We believe the space will consolidate as rising customer acquisition costs heighten barriers to entry; the winners will likely be companies with differentiated product portfolios.” — Analyst Doug Creutz, explaining why he thinks there will be fewer mobile gaming companies in the future.

QUOTE | “Being able to build tech from the ground up is incredibly liberating.” — LucasArts and Kabam veteran Haden Blackman, talking about the excitement of founding new studio Hangar 13 for 2K Games.

QUOTE | “We are not just fighting against the other publishers, the way I see it is we are fighting for the allocation of time and money.” — Atari CEO Frederic Chesnais, taking about the difficulty of building games and finding an audience.

QUOTE | “You have all these fantastically talented developers, they pour all of their talent and passion into creating a game… they have ascended the peak of the first mountain.” — Unity VP of online services Todd Hooper, explaining why Unity is adding analytics to its game development tools to help developers climb the second mountain of monetisation and audience building.

Image via Shutterstock


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