QUOTE | “The Kickstarter experience had been wading in a sea of love … it was like being dumped from that into this cold pool of Internet Twitter hate.” — Tim Schafer of Double Fine, on the backlash to the announcement that the Kickstarter-funded Broken Age game would be split into two parts.
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “TV ads today are chum in the water. It attracts customers, then reel them in with digital media.” — Electronic Arts’ Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore, on the lessons EA has learned as it transitions more to digital games.
QUOTE | “When strangers on the Internet attack you en masse, it can be a surreal experience, and it can affect you in a very emotional way.” — Dustin Hendricks, designer/programmer at Last Life Games, talking along with other developers about the lessons of Flappy Bird.
STAT | 175 — Number of licensees to Activision’s hit Skylanders franchise, which now includes General Mills and Crayola; Skylanders has brought in more than $US2 billion at retail so far.
QUOTE | “I suspect the idea of another multi-year effort to take BioShock to the next level was really daunting to contemplate.” — IDC analyst Lewis Ward, commenting along with other analysts on Take-Two’s decision to close down Irrational Games.
QUOTE | “Male heroes should no longer be the default.” — Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone, on why developers should question their design choices.
QUOTE | “It’s really hard on mobile, and we experienced this ourselves, the paid market is almost non-existent.” — Michael Schade, CEO of Rockfish Games, on why they left off doing mobile games after more than 10 years to work on console games.
QUOTE | “That’s my worry at this point, that indie is getting so professional, so big, that we’re actually standing in the spotlight of a lot of smaller independent studios.” — Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail on the huge rise in the indies scene and the problems associated with that growth.
STAT | 36 per cent — Amount of the US population that plays downloaded games on either a PC or a console, according to NPD; some 16 per cent say they only play digitally distributed games and never buy discs anymore.
QUOTE | “NBA 2K14 is the fastest-selling NBA game in history … 2K has figured out how to crack the code.” — Vicky Picca, senior vice president of merchandising for the National Basketball Association, on how the NBA gets a big boost from video games.
QUOTE | “We’re a bunch of nerds of varying tastes who set out to create a game full of things that we really enjoyed.” — Molly Carroll of Chucklefish Games, on who they are and why their space-crafting game Starbound is going well.
This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International
Image by jayfish [Shutterstock]
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