What’s happened in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “Steam ate Microsoft’s lunch.” — Tony Goodman, founder of now defunct Ensemble Studios, talking about how publishers are going to have to change, and he reflects on how Bungie saw Halo Wars as “whoring out the franchise”.
QUOTE | “Sony’s strategy … is somewhat baffling to say the least.” — Richard Leadbetter, tech-savvy game journalist, commenting about Sony’s bringing a new PS3 to market at the same price as its higher quality predecessor.
QUOTE | “The trouble with a great idea is that you’ve got to come up with another one. And another one.” — Peter Molyneux, veteran game designer, talking about the difficulties of virtual cubes and social games.
STAT | 60 per cent — Amount that physical retail sales of World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria dropped from the previous expansion, according to Lazard Capital; retailers sold 600k to 700k copies in the first 24 hours, compared to 3.3 million copies of Cataclysm.
QUOTE | “World of Warcraft‘s very success runs contrary to the conventional wisdom.” — Rob Fahey, former editor of GamesIndustry.biz, talking about the unusual ways WoW has managed to keep millions of players happy for nearly 10 years.
QUOTE | “We were lazy as an industry.” — Chris Early, VP of Digital at Ubisoft, talking about how free-to-play has made game companies sharpen up their designs.
QUOTE | “A lot of people hit a wall and found it frustrating.” — Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard, talking about one of the things Blizzard didn’t get right with Cataclysm that they’re hoping to fix with Mists of Pandaria.
QUOTE | “We will see a lot more cannibalising of the handheld market.” — Jun Iwasaki, former head of Sqaure Enix USA, talking about the future for tablets and his new company GungHo Entertainment.
QUOTE | “We’re pretty happy. We’re doing OK.” — Chet Faliszek, writer at Valve, debunking the rumour that Valve is being bought by Nexon and NCsoft for $US893 million.
QUOTE | “It’s hard to look [negatively] at a platform where there’s 350 million-plus game players.” — Jeff Karp, former Zynga VP and now VP at GSN, talking about why you shouldn’t see Facebook as a bad platform for games.
STAT | 353,000 — Number of physical retail copies of FIFA 13 EA sold in North America on its first day for Xbox 360 and PS3; that number is up 42% over FIFA 12’s first-day sales.
QUOTE | “Suddenly things had to change very quickly and it was extremely painful for those affected.” — New OnLive CEO Charles Jablonski, trying to explain the reasons that OnLive went through its painful death and rebirth.
STAT | 25 billion — Number of apps downloaded from Google Play so far; games constitute one of the biggest app categories on Google Play.
This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International
Image from Shutterstock
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