QUOTE | “The majority of those users probably wouldn’t have bought the game anyway. So it’s not like we’re losing revenue… It’s essentially free marketing.” — Monument Valley producer Dan Grey, talking about the fact that 95 per cent of the Android copies of Monument Valley are pirated.
QUOTE | “By the time the big companies that are looking at a number of assets they can deploy to make various games — and they say there is a zero install base in VR right now, we need to focus on these other (things) — they will miss it, they always do.” — Oculus VR’s Jason Rubin, talking about why he thinks big companies won’t be making big money from VR games.
QUOTE | “We’re planning a very large presence at GDC with Steam Machines being front and centre.” — Statement by Valve, after Origin PC CEO Kevin Wasielewski said that the Steam Machine brand is “pretty much dead”.
STAT | 10 per cent — Amount that revenue from the Japanese console market (combining hardware and software) dropped in 2014; the total revenue is at its lowest point in 20 years, with hardware falling faster than software.
QUOTE | “A lot of people are really negative about it at the moment and it’s a real shame because, actually, it’s a real opportunity for the smaller studios to innovate and do exciting things.” — Developer Hutch’s CEO Shaun Rutland, explaining why they left AAA development to work on free-to-play mobile games.
QUOTE | “My programming skills are so tied to an ageing and abandoned development platform that making even a niche title like my previous games is a dubious proposition at best.” — Solium Infernum developer Vic Davis, talking about why he’s decided to switch to making board games.
STAT | 8.51 million — Number of concurrent users on Steam on 4 January, setting a new record for Valve; the most played game on Steam, by far, is DotA 2, with more than 835,000 players at its peak.
QUOTE | “Goodbye Microsoft. It was a good run. Xbox was Great! Time to do something new.” — Boyd Multerer, creator of Xbox Live and XNA at Microsoft, tweeting goodbye to the company after 17 years.
QUOTE | “We hold EA’s use of the former players’ likenesses is not incidental because it is central to EA’s main commercial purpose — to create a realistic virtual simulation of football games involving current and former NFL teams.” — Circuit Judge Raymond Fisher, explaining in his ruling why he’s allowing the lawsuit by former NFL players against EA to proceed.
STAT | $US10 billion — Amount that iOS app developers were paid by Apple in 2014; the App Store brought in a record $US500 million in the first week of 2015, and 1 January was the biggest single day in App Store history.
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3 responses to “This Week In Business: Big Companies Missing Out On Big Money”
“[T]hey say there is a zero install base in VR right now” – perhaps because the only real publicly available VR headset is Google Cardboard?
There’s been a heck of a lot of positive press for VR in the press over the last few years, since development hardware seems to have been sent to quite a few journalists, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a headset for sale unless I went looking on eBay.
I’ve seen a handful of games offering Rift support recently and wondered why they bother – 3D printers probably have a bigger market penetration than 3D VR headsets at this point.
This is not an article. It is a series of tweets put under a title and a banner image.
I like how about 50% of “this week in business articles” are some dev desperately trying to justify their move to mobile gaming.