“You need the hacker, the designer and the huckster to start your game company. Somebody’s got to be the huckster.” — Tim Train, CEO of Big Huge Games, talking about what it takes to make a successful game company.
QUOTE | “I joined THQ, and THQ goes broke. I join Kojima, and Kojima leaves Konami. I have decided, in order not to destroy anyone else’s life, I have decided I will never again get involved in video games. Otherwise, I’ll join someone and his house will explode, or something.” — Film director Guillermo Del Toro, talking about why he’s giving up working on games.
QUOTE | “Console is a blue ocean for MOBAs. The overall growth of the genre [on PC] is starting to slow.” — Todd Harris of Hi-Rez Studios, talking about why he feels Smite‘s eSports presence and Xbox One launch can close the gap on market leaders.
STAT | 142 per cent — Amount that Take-Two’s sales rose last quarter compared to the same quarter last year, to $US275.3 million; this was due to the release of the PC version of GTA V, which has now sold more than 54 million copies across all versions.
QUOTE | “A comparison of the year-over-year console software sales suggests that the 8th generation is performing better than the 7th generation — provided you exclude the Nintendo consoles.” — Patrick Walker, VP of insights at EEDAR, talking about how core console software sales are higher than ever.
QUOTE | “We don’t actually yet know what the full arc of the story and the player experience is going to be — we write the game and build the narrative as we go.” — Fulbright’s Steve Gaynor, talking about the intricacies of building their new game Tacoma.
STAT | 12 per cent — Amount digital game sales in the US rose last month (to $US1.03 billion) compared to the same month last year, according to SuperData; most of the growth came from PC and mobile, which combined were 60 per cent of the total.
STAT | 17 per cent — Amount that video game accessories sales in retail stores grew last month over the same month the previous year, according to NPD; this was attributed to strong sales of point and subscription cards, while software sales were flat and hardware rose only two per cent.
STAT | $US20 million — Amount of revenue that Hearthstone is generating per month for Blizzard, according to research firm SuperData; the game has nine million players on mobile and eight million on PC.
QUOTE | “Nothing gets widespread attention until it starts bringing in big money. So I guess we need more visibility at the intersection of Women and Big Money.” — Game designer Whitney Hills, talking about the challenges women in the games industry face.
STAT | Five million — Number of copies sold so far of Techalnd’s Dying Light zombie game; not surprisingly, the developer is considering a sequel while they work on more DLC for the game.
STAT | 345,000 — Number of visitors that attended this year’s Gamescom consumer game show in Cologne, Germany, setting an attendance record; the show had 806 exhibitors and 33,200 professional visitors.
Top image from Shustterstock
Comments
5 responses to “This Week In The Business: The Hacker, The Designer And The Huckster”
“A comparison of the year-over-year console software sales suggests that the 8th generation is performing better than the 7th generation — provided you exclude the Nintendo consoles.”
So, the 8th generation isn’t performing as well as the 7th generation, because Nintendo consoles are still consoles whether you choose to pretend they are or not.
Great to see that there’s still no point in taking analysts of the video game market seriously.
More likely that the 8th generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft are performing better that their 7th.
Unlike Nintendo, whose current generation console (the WiiU) is performing worse than their previous console (the Wii).
Not everything is a slight at Nintendo… whether you choose to pretend it is or not.
This has absolutely nothing to do with my opinions on Nintendo and everything to do with people completely misconstruing facts.
Everything is something if you put a condition on what that something is.
Edit: If you want to say that the 8th generation consoles from MS and Sony are doing better, then the correct way to say that would be “A comparison of the year-over-year console software sales suggest that Microsoft and Sony’s current generation consoles are performing better than the previous generation of consoles”
As it stands with the way it’s written though, if you have to exclude Nintendo for your statistic to be valid, then it’s not all that valid then, is it?
@tichey care to explain the downvote?