This Week In The Business: That Mad MOBA Money

$US501 million — Amount of money that MOBAs will earn in the USA this year, according to EEDAR; this will be greater the the $US499 million expected from MMORPGs and the $US237 million expected from shooters.

Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “In the early days of Xbox… everybody and their brother who saw the new project starting tried to come in and say it should be free, say it should be forced to run Windows after some period of time.” — Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley, talking about the early days of the Xbox.

QUOTE | “Microsoft is much more interested in making a happy community of players and making the Xbox and Windows 10 a fun place to play — it doesn’t need us to be evil.” — Fable Legends game director David Eckelberry, explaining why the game will be free-to-play.

QUOTE | “Really this subtle sexism was just the tip of the iceberg. Subtle quickly came and went and left behind overt misogyny.” — Julia Hardy, host of UK video game show GameFace, talking about the online comments she’s received and why she started a blog about it.

QUOTE | “The problem I’m seeing is that because you’re forced to make free-to-play games, you’re very limited in what you can do.” — Double Zero One Zero’s Pontus Lunden, talking about the issues facing indie developers.

QUOTE | “We have a company objective to get closer to our gamers.” — Ubisoft Consumer Relationship Director Stéphane Catherine, talking about Ubisoft’s new Consumer Relationship Centre opening in the UK.

QUOTE | “‘We should go midcore now because the casual market is too crowded’ is an approach you only take when you’re not up to the fight of making the best game possible in class and get it out.” — Bossa Studios CEO Henrique Olifiers, talking about how to succeed as an indie studio.

QUOTE | “The midcore market is already extremely fierce. I don’t know if it’s easier [than casual]. It takes a lot to succeed. It takes a really good game, and there aren’t any tricks to that.” — Juicebox Games CEO Michael Martinez, talking about the difference between casual and midcore games.

QUOTE | “We haven’t talked to Nintendo about targets, but at DeNA, our best-selling game brought in three billion yen a month, and we want to surpass that.” — DeNA CEO Isao Moriyasu, talking about his company’s plans for making more than $US25 million per month with Nintendo.

QUOTE | “It’s very important to get featured still, but that’s only because without it you make zero.” — Weirdbeard Games’ Niels Monshouwer, speaking with other indie developers about the difficulty of succeeding with mobile games.

QUOTE | “Devolver believes that gamers like movies and music of all kinds, and that the indie offerings in particular have a chance to see much greater success on Steam than on mainstream platforms.” — Devolver Digital co-founder Mike Wilson, explaining why the company just put the first non-documentary film on Steam.