This Week In The Business: You Do Not Talk About Fail Club

This Week In The Business: You Do Not Talk About Fail Club

“We’re trying, as an industry, we’re trying so f**king hard to just be fine. We talk about our successes and our achievements, but we shun mentioning our failures.” — Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, talking about what’s right and wrong with the game industry in a recent blog post.

Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “If we look at our industry today, there’s reason to believe that we are fucked… If we look at casual games in 2015, what’s out there is mostly crap.” — The Binary Family’s Thorsten Rauser, talking about the ruinous influence of free-to-play on the casual gaming sector of the market.

QUOTE | “Some people in the franchise leadership were totally opposed to zombies and a zombies mode, and they thought it would be a disgrace to the franchise.” — Treyarch head Mark Lamia, talking about Call of Duty: World at War‘s zombies that almost didn’t make it into the game.

QUOTE | “Players are so promiscuous they will try everything and they’re looking for reasons to put money in, not looking for value to get out. So it’s a very different model for us.” — Alex Seropian, CEO of Industrial Toys, explaining how different their mobile game Midnight Star is from the games he created as head of Bungie.

QUOTE | “Can’t wait to make Xbox One games!” — John Smedley, president of Daybreak Game Company, that was formerly Sony Online Entertainment, now acquired by investment firm Columbus Nova, tweeting about how they will expand to new platforms.

STAT | 6.4 million — Number of PS4 consoles shipped to stores in the fourth quarter of 2014, Sony reported during its earnings call; this is up from 4.5 million shipped in the same quarter of 2013.

STAT | 45 million — Total number of copies of Grand Theft Auto V sold through the end of 2014, according to TakeTwo’s latest earnings report; ten million of those were sold on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One since 18 November and the company expects the number to grow substantially when the PC version ships.

QUOTE | “At Blizzard we view eSports as a community builder.” — Blizzard executive producer Chris Sigaty, talking about things the studio is still learning from its players.

STAT | 20 million — Number of matches played in the Halo 5 beta, according to Microsoft; over 181 million kills were made during a collective 290 years of gameplay logged.

QUOTE | “We anticipate that Katy’s significant global audience, including more than 170 million fans on social media, will make her a strong gaming partner for Glu.” — Niccolo De Masi, CEO of Glu Mobile, talking about their five-year deal with pop star Katy Perry to make mobile games.

STAT | $US850 million — Amount of revenue that Activision Blizzard received from Destiny and Hearthstone combined in 2014; according to Activision’s earnings report; the company had $US4.81 billion in total revenues for 2014.

Image via Shutterstock


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


2 responses to “This Week In The Business: You Do Not Talk About Fail Club”