This Week In The Business: The Real Problem With Switch Ports

This Week In The Business: The Real Problem With Switch Ports

“Switch is not as powerful as a PS4 or Xbox One. Everyone knows that. But the difference isn’t as big as the general perception would have you believe.” — Abstraction Games CEO Ralph Egas says the studio’s biggest challenge in porting Ark: Survival Evolved to the Switch was not processor power, but getting everything they needed to fit on a 16GB cartridge (32GB cartridges can be used, but are pricey).

Image: Studio Wildcard

QUOTE | “For Sony and Microsoft to support their customers well they have to be open to all their customer’s friends — their real-world friends — otherwise they’re breaking up real-world social groups.” — Epic CEO Tim Sweeney explains why it’s inevitable Xbox and PlayStation players will eventually be able to play with each other across platforms.

QUOTE | “Why would rabbits be shooting inks? Why would rabbits be able to submerge themselves in ink when they shot it? Something about that concept didn’t fit right.” — Splatoon producer Hisashi Nogami describes some of the nonsense ideas the development team tried out before settling on the game’s perfectly reasonable squid-kid hybrid characters.

QUOTE | “Our only goal is to protect our ability to tell more stories in the Star Control multiverse.” — Kevin Unangst of Star Control rights holder Stardock explains the company’s spat with original Star Control developers Paul Reiche and Fred Ford, who are working on their own successor to the franchise.

STAT | $US225,000 ($292,321) — The amount of money Reiche and Ford would pay Stardock as part of a settlement the company allegedly proposed in the dispute. Other conditions included that Reiche and Ford would issue a public apology, not work on any game similar to Star Control for the next five years, and surrender all their IP rights to the alien races used in the original Star Control games.

QUOTE | “The thing with player behaviour, and the thing with systems like Honour, is that we need to continue to invest. Communities change over time; we learn new things, we screw up in new ways, and we need to adapt and keep evolving these systems…” — Riot Games senior technical designer Kimberly Voll says cultivating positive player behaviour is an ongoing commitment.

QUOTE | “We envision a world where games are free of harassment, discrimination, abuse and where players can express themselves through play.” — An excerpt from the Fair Play Alliance mission statement. The FPA was formed this week by a coalition of more than 30 game companies, including Blizzard, Riot, Xbox, Epic, Supercell and Twitch.

QUOTE | “There are two sides to the coin here. If you just let developers do whatever the hell they want, it will cost a lot of money. Something that’s been missing, but is becoming more and more common, is to have a very clear vision from the beginning.” A Way Out director Josef Fares wants publishers to start taking bigger risks on creators, and for creators to respect the risks being taken in them.

QUOTE | “In future titles, as deep learning technology matures, I expect self-learning agents to be part of the games themselves, as truly intelligent NPCs that can master a range of tasks, and that adapt and evolve over time as they accumulate experience from engaging with human players.” — EA SEED’s Magnus Nordin, who has been training an AI to play Battlefield, sees tremendous future potential for AI in games.

QUOTE | “They need to understand what can be achieved. They need to understand what the steps to unionisation are. They need to decide amongst themselves who they are going to align with or are they going to start their own organisation.” — Steve Kaplan of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees made the trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to sit in on what had been shaping up to be an anti-union panel run by the International Game Developers Association.

QUOTE | “When you send cold emails, they don’t really read it or get interested unless it’s something they have heard of. But what really works is if they watch their fellow streamers streaming the game on Twitch and they don’t have access? They want it.” — PUBG Corportion lead community manager Sammie Kang explains how PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds used exclusivity and a core community of low and mid-tier streamers to build a pre-launch following with no marketing budget.


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