This Week In The Business: Development Challenges, Big And Small

“If a player sees our game, [and] intuitively he or she is not able to compare it immediately with another game, then we have succeeded”. — Remedy Entertainment CEO Tero Virtala wants to make Control a true ‘Remedy’ game, apart from its past Microsoft-owned IPs Quantum Break and Alan Wake.

QUOTE | “Because we streamed to the [Steam] store page, because there’s so much traffic coming anyway, it goes through the roof. This [concurrent viewers] is on par with being on the front page of Twitch and you don’t have to pay for it”. — Rockfish CEO Michael Schade found streaming directly to a game’s Steam store page to be a game changer for marketing an indie like Everspace.

QUOTE | “If we don’t stick the landing, then we’re going to feel like it was all for naught, so we’ve taken it very very seriously”. — After working at BioWare during the fallout from Mass Effect 3‘s endings, Stoic co-founder Arnie Jorgensen has a better understanding of how to make the Banner Saga 3‘s ending feel more personal to the player.

QUOTE | “It’s not every man for himself, it’s not battle royale or any one of 100 other things people assumed that it was. It’s an RPG where you still do quests and explore the world”. — Bethesda’s Pete Hines discusses how player engagement and the uncertainty of player encounters will shape and distinguish Fallout 76.

QUOTE | “My initial instinct was, ’88 per cent? Wow, that’s amazing!’ Then the rational side of myself kicked in and was like, ‘Well, 88 per cent of what?’” — The Unreal Marketplace has swapped to an 88 per cent/12 per cent revenue share model for its asset creators, but Unity head of asset store Peter O’Reilly says Unity has no need to adjust its 70 per cent/30 per cent split in response.

STAT | $US1 ($1.35) billion — The amount of money Epic Games has made from Fortnite‘s in-game purchases alone since October 2017, when its battle royale mode launched.

QUOTE | “If I look at the last five years, the fact that we’re seeing repeat games and repeat studios coming to the platform makes me feel good about the job we’re doing”. — ID@Xbox director Chris Charla reflects on the five years of the program’s existence, both the successes and the pain points.

STAT | $US10.35 ($14) billion — Microsoft’s gaming revenue reported for the last fiscal year. The company made $US2.29 ($3) billion in the last fiscal quarter, up 39 per cent year over year.

QUOTE | “Currently, the ‘ban’ of games has been quite rare, because GCAM — and other Middle East rating boards like National Media Council in the United Arab Emirates — actually work hand in hand with the game publishers either directly or via their official distributors”. — Saudi Arabia localisation expert Nazih Fares joins Ubisoft localisation head Malek Teffaha to clarify that Saudi Arabia did not ban 47 games in response to child suicides.

QUOTE | “When we did the IPO we had only two quoted peers. Now we have four and we hope others will join our community. Analyst and investor interest will only grow as the investment opportunities increase”. –Sumo Group CEO Carl Cavers, along with Frontier boss David Braben and Team17 lead Debbie Bestwick examine the UK gaming industry’s recent turnaround as the country offers more opportunities to studios.

QUOTE “Historically games development has seen audio as something you just stick on top of the game, you don’t actually think of it as part of the design”. — Dead Space 3 and Red Alert 3 composer James Hannigan joins Get Even composer Olivier Derivière to talk about the wasted potential of music in video games.