What’s happened in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “I’m not allowed to say bad things.” — Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami talking about his new game The Evil Within while avoiding saying what he thinks of the recent directions Capcom has taken with Resident Evil.
QUOTE | “I think this news will make some revisit and question the wisdom of the entire Xbox One strategy.” — Industry analyst Lewis Ward, talking about Don Mattrick’s departure from Microsoft to become CEO of Zynga.
QUOTE | “I see our approach on PS4 as really taking Sony Computer Entertainment back to our original roots.” — Andrew House, president of SCEA, talking about how Sony is giving smaller developers a chance.
QUOTE | “Maybe the AAA of 60-hours with everything on a disc will kind of disappear.” — Patrice Desilets, former creative director of Assassin’s Creed, talking about how games will be created in smaller chunks.
QUOTE | “There’s no way on God’s green Earth that we would take on a venture like this on our own.” — Matias Myllyrinne, CEO of Remedy Entertainment, talking about making Quantum Break, combining a game and a TV show.
QUOTE | “Atari has been really abused by a succession of shareholders who were just interested in the royalty streams.” — Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, talking about how successive Atari owners didn’t care about games.
QUOTE | “Eventually, you have to go free.” — Michael Schade, CEO of developer Fishlabs, talking about how their AAA mobile game could have made seven figures a month if it was designed as F2P from the start.
QUOTE | “Now that Mr. Mattrick has taken the job at Zynga, EA is back to square one in its search.” — Michael Pachter, talking about how Don Mattrick was the leading candidate for the job of CEO at Electronic Arts.
QUOTE | “Full market transparency, including digital, is incredibly important to the health of the industry.” — David McQuillan, president of the Games group at NPD, talking about why they will start reporting digital sales numbers monthly this year.
QUOTE | “For us it’s a great feature, it’s a must-have for the new generation of consoles.” — Ubisoft managing director Nicolas Rioux, talking about the studio’s new drive for second-screen companion apps to console games.
STAT | 25 — Number of studios working on AAA console games worldwide, according to EA’s chief creative officer Rich Hilleman; seven or eight years ago that number was 125, but the total number of people is about the same.
QUOTE | “It certainly seems like Sony are embracing indie developers and self-publishing models.” — Jackbox Games GM Mike Bilder, talking about how the company is only interested in self-publishing on consoles.
STAT | 17 million — Number of downloads of the Xbox SmartGlass companion app, according to Microsoft; users are spending 16 minutes on average with SmartGlass per application.
This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International.
Image by Shutterstock
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