This Week In The Business: Great Job, Sega

“We go to Sega and the board turned it down, which I thought was the stupidest decision ever made in the history of business.” — Former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, talking about the deal he had with Sony to share in the development of a new console.

Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “So is match-fixing a problem? Absolutely it’s a problem.” — Twitch COO Kevin Lin, talking about the growing pains of eSports and why eSports will continue to grow despite such issues.

QUOTE | “It’s getting harder to be an indie, to even be competitive or be noticed — it feels like our industry is pushing super behemoth giant projects like the GTAs and the Destinys.” — Fun Bits CEO Chris Millar, talking about the grim realities and excitement of independent development.

QUOTE | “We could be making a lot more money per user. But, you know what? We don’t want to.” — Hipster Whale’s Matt Hall, talking about their mobile hit Crossy Road and why they aren’t pushing monetisation.

STAT | 500,000 — Number of copies of Minecraft sold on PlayStation in Japan, across the PS4, PS3 and PS Vita; more than 200,000 of those copies have been sold on the PS Vita since it was released in October 2014.

QUOTE | “It’s not like people don’t want to spend money, they want to spend money on things that they love and they want to be charged honestly.” — Neil Young, former CEO of mobile developer ngmoco, talking about why his new company N3twork has shifted from entertainment to producing games.

QUOTE | “Most people are going to want to have the world available to them within a split second.” — CastAR co-founder Jeri Ellsworth, talking about the problems facing virtual reality and augmented reality.

QUOTE | “A lot of people seem to be defining ‘Casual’ as a free-to-play game with ads and as many millions of users as they can get.” — Daniel Fountain of Lumino City developer State of Play, talking along with other developers about the state of casual gaming.

STAT | 750 hours — The average amount of DotA 2 playtime among the top 25 per cent of DotA 2 players, according to EEDAR; the number of DotA 2 copies installed has increased 85 per cent over the past year to 42.9 million.

STAT | 63 per cent — Amount of digital revenue for console games in January claimed by PlayStation consoles worldwide, according to SuperData; the top title was GTA V, which brought in $US31.8 million from digital downloads in January.

QUOTE | “It would be far more damaging to rush to release a product that wasn’t ready and cause another failed attempt to launch VR into the mainstream.” — Tammeka producer Sam Watts, talking about the uncertainties and delays of developing VR title Radial-G Racing Revolved.

Top image via Shutterstock.