“In the very near term I am fearful of journalists.” – Unity boss John Riccitiello speaking during the Vision Summit keynote about how press might react to the shortfall between the analyst numbers and his own forecasts on VR.
Elsewhere in the business of gaming this week…
QUOTE | “Console games can be for Christmas, but a free to play game is for life.” – Space Ape’s Simon Hade talking about its partnership with Hasbro for Transformers and its thoughts on free to play.
QUOTE | “I think that I struggle to see us going back to making that type of game, the games that aren’t really about anything.” – Martin Sahlin, Coldwood creative director, talking about why making Unravel was so important to him and his studio.
STAT | 25 million — The number of registered players in Bungie’s Destiny: The Taken King expansion, which Activision Blizzard said “achieved record digital attach rates”; a “large new expansion” is planned for this year and a full sequel in 2017.
QUOTE | “There are more projects than ever trying their hand at getting funded on the platform.” — ICO Partners’ Thomas Bidaux examining the state of video game projects on Kickstarter in 2015 and observing how success has been driven by large projects.
QUOTE | “When you do something new and ground-breaking then it’s normal that people will scrutinise us, and I think that’s only fair.” – IO studio head Hans Seifert talking about why the developer chose to suddenly switch the release plan and business model behind Hitman to be episodic.
STAT | $US100 ($141) billion — The worldwide app store revenues that analytics firm App Annie is forecasting for the year 2020, with games continuing to make up the lion’s share of revenues.
STAT | $US117 ($165) million — The mega-sized loss suffered by Zynga in its last fiscal year, which is actually an improvement over the company’s 2014 campaign, which saw it post a net loss of $US225.9 ($318) million.
QUOTE | “SuperData CEO Joost van Dreunen authored a misinformed, gratuitous critique of the Entertainment Software Association and our place in the video game industry.” – Rich Taylor, ESA Senior VP, Communications and Industry Affairs, defending the ESA against van Dreunen’s accusation that it no longer represents the video game industry as a whole.
QUOTE | “We’re at a stage where you can’t really distinguish eSports from game development anymore.” – Blizzard chief Mike Morhaime discussing the growing importance of eSports to his studio and the industry, emphasising that developers need to think about eSports when building a game today.
Comments
2 responses to “This Week In The Business: Feardom Of The Press”
Ugh, this doesn’t even mean anything! Just make a good multiplayer game that doesn’t pander to idiots and people will want to see who’s best at it!
Ffs.
Don Mattrick really left the Xbox division in the shit and did the same with Zynga it seems too. Makes you wonder what is going on with the executives of these big gaminh companies.