QUOTE | “You ever feel like what we’re doing is too much like pornography?” — Trip Hawkins, EA and Digital Chocolate founder, asking an odd question while on the difficulty of monetising games.
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “A culture where mistakes are frowned on absolutely crushes creativity.” — Ted Price, CEO of Insomniac Games, on the attributes that team leaders in the games business must have to succeed.
QUOTE | “As tablets become more powerful, I am of the view that they’ll be a wonderful gaming platform — but they’re not quite there yet.” — Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, explaining why the company is moving cautiously on mobile devices.
STAT | 14 million — Number of copies of Minecraft sold for the PC; in just the 24 hours following that announcement Minecraft then sold over 18,310 copies on PC or Mac.
STAT | $US4.58 billion — Revenue Activision brought in for 2013, which is down six per cent from 2012; the company expects sales to drop somewhat in 2014, as most of the important releases are due later in the year.
STAT | 292% — Amount Sony’s game division increased its profits last quarter, though revenue climbed only 64 per cent; overall, Sony’s revenue rose nearly 24 per cent for the quarter, but it barely eked out a profit.
STAT | 32.5 million — Number of copies of Grand Theft Auto V that Take-Two Interactive has shipped so far; not surprisingly the company’s revenue for the last quarter hit $US1.86 billion, up from $US415.8 million in 2012.
QUOTE | “Consoles even seem to have become more and more MMO and F2P friendly.” — Olivier Comte, COO of Ankama, on creating transmedia properties and console games.
STAT | 40 per cent — Amount that Capcom’s mobile game revenue dropped in the last nine months of 2013 due to lack of new hits; overall, the company’s revenue was up 3.5 per cent due to good console game sales.
QUOTE | “I’m confident we will, over time, increase the number of categories that we go after in our design to be the number one social gaming company in the world.” — Clive Downie, COO of Zynga, on how the company plans to use NaturalMotion technology in future games.
QUOTE | “VR is going to be one of the most important technologies in the history of mankind.” — Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR founder, on why he thinks VR is going mainstream, in gaming and beyond.
This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International
Image by Elnur [Shutterstock]
Comments
3 responses to “This Week In The Business: ‘Too Much Like Pornography?’”
Classic EA, confusing pornography with rape…
Mobile gaming which was hyped as the great white hope of gaming is rapidly going down the toilet, most of the good indie dev’s that started on mobile have moved on to steam or PSN/XBL leaving just the sharks and rip-off merchants.
Console and pc dev’s should take note as the gaming crash that will soon surely hit the mobile space will spread to traditional gaming if they continue to follow mobile’s lead in regards to micro-transactions and treating the customers as walking wallets.
Part of the problem is that a sizeable portion of the mobile audience are perfectly happy to play things like Flappy Bird – a game which could have been mostly developed in an afternoon over anything more complex and arguably worthwhile.