“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
Comments
2 responses to “This Week In The Business: You Do Not Talk About Fail Club”
Alex Seropian sounds like a swell guy….
I can’t help but feel he likened us to a douche bag frat boys view on drunk college girls.