QUOTE | “I’m so proud of the team and what it looks like—diversity attracts diversity.” – Bonnie Ross, head of Halo developer 343 Industries and corporate VP at Microsoft, says she wants more diversity both in the games the industry makes and in the people who make them.
QUOTE | “I predict no next-gen PlayStation or Xbox launches for 2019. However, Sony and Microsoft should officially reveal first details, including an increased focus on cloud and subscription models for their next consoles.” – Dr. Serkan Toto is one of a number of analysts sharing their predictions for the year ahead in gaming.
STAT | 80% – Percentage of UK game spending that came from digital sources in 2018. However, 75% of AAA game sales are still physical copies, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association.
QUOTE | “Given that Plaintiff largely created the foregoing predicament, the Court is disinclined to extricate Plaintiff from a peril of its own making.” – US District Court Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong has little sympathy for Stardock in its legal dispute with Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. Her ruling cleared the way for Ford and Reiche to have Stardock’s Star Control: Origins removed from GOG and Steam.
STAT | 379 – The number of tagged This Week in the Business columns published on Kotaku during its nearly eight-year run, which ends today.
QUOTE | “Is this because I put a Major Payne reference in the headline last time? Because technically, that was a Megadeth reference.” – Me, upon learning the column would be ending.
In all seriousness, eight years is a pretty good run for anything in media these days.
While it would be easy to describe This Week in the Business as a collection of random quotes and stats, I hope some of you feel that you got something more out of it, because I certainly did.
On a good week, the industry would conspire to create its own themes for the column, drawing interesting parallels between seemingly disparate corners of the industry that were more readily visible when these quotes and stats were removed from their natural surroundings and dropped on top of another. On those weeks, putting the column together was like staring at one of those Magic Eye drawings, taking in a buzzing jumble of chaos and relaxing one’s focus on the details until a bigger picture became clear. (Or possibly it wasn’t like that at all. I could never see those Magic Eye images so I couldn’t really say how they worked.)
If nothing else, compiling This Week in the Business each week underscored for me how nothing in this industry exists in a vacuum, that virtually every discussion and debate we have is in some way a tangent of every other one, and that understanding more of them gives us a better grounding to affect any of them.
As This Week in the Business goes dark, I’d like to say on behalf of GamesIndustry.biz that we appreciate Kotaku and its readers for being gracious hosts to us all these years. It’s been more fun than a column with that name had any right to be.
Comments
4 responses to “This Week In The Business: Out Of Business”
I always really enjoyed reading this each week and am sad to see it go. Thanks for the memories!
Aw nuts. I love these little factoids, quoted and stats every week. What the hell, Kotaku?
Ummmm this is one of the columns I actually read every time
Why is this disappearing? It’s one of the best regular columns on the site. Am I weird in reading it? Do most people skip past?
Yeah, why get rid of something genuinely interesting like this? If we have to throw something over the side I’d rather keep this and ditch all the esports bullshit.