This Week In The Business: A Young Man’s Game

“It has become harder and harder for me to find jobs, and particularly after I got past 50 years old.” — 59-year-old designer David Mullich, talking with other game industry veterans about the pervasive age prejudice in the game industry.

Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “Anyone working on VR content on PC using Oculus is prototyping for Morpheus games. So I’m like thank you Oculus for providing so many kits at affordable price.” — Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, talking about Sony’s VR headset Project Morpheus.

QUOTE | “How on Earth do you a) actually get people to realise your game exists, and b) get a critical mass of people to play your game so you actually make money, when literally, every five seconds a new game gets released?” — Gunfire Games founder David Adams, talking about the difficulties of developing games today.

QUOTE | “We never expect everyone to buy everything. I would be horrified actually if anyone did buy everything. That would not be a good use of people’s money.” — Dovetail’s Jon Rissik, talking about the company’s DLC for its game Train Simulator.

QUOTE | “I won’t do anything unless I’m going to get super passionate about it. Results vary, but if you don’t start with that, you have no hope.” — Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford, talking about surviving as an independent studio doing AAA games.

QUOTE | “There are a lot of big indies that don’t use contracts because what they rely on is trust and faith.” — Dutch indie developer Adriaan de Jongh talking about why he created a free, do-it-yourself contract creator for indies.

QUOTE | “I don’t think we’ve locked ourselves out.” — Xbox head Phil Spencer, explaining that while HoloLens is an AR device, the company still may be a player in VR at some point.

STAT | 7 per cent — Amount total video game hardware and software retail sales increased in February over February 2014, according to NPD; while console sales overall were down 5 per cent, the 3DS led all console sales for the month with 395,000 units sold (mostly New 3DS XL units).

QUOTE | “We’ve had an incredibly successful commercial launch with Evolve.” — Take-Two president Karl Slatoff, talking about sales of Evolve, which was the #2 selling title in game stores for February.

QUOTE | “We are always always working against these attacks. Actually, an attack happens every day. Literally every day.” — Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida, explaining how his studio is playing a cat-and-mouse game with hackers.

QUOTE | “The commonly used terms of casual, mid-core and core are at best vague, but perhaps they make some developers feel better.” — Graham McAllister, founder of Player Research, talking about how too many devs don’t know who they’re designing for.

Top image via Shutterstock