This Week In Business: Big Companies Missing Out On Big Money

QUOTE | “The majority of those users probably wouldn’t have bought the game anyway. So it’s not like we’re losing revenue… It’s essentially free marketing.” – Monument Valley producer Dan Gray, talking about the fact that 95% of the Android copies of Monument Valley are pirated

QUOTE | “By the time the big companies that are looking at a number of assets they can deploy to make various games – and they say there is a zero install base in VR right now, we need to focus on these other (things) – they will miss it, they always do.” – Oculus VR’s Jason Rubin, talking about why he thinks big companies won’t be making big money from VR games

QUOTE | “We’re planning a very large presence at GDC with Steam Machines being front and center.” – Statement by Valve, after Origin PC CEO Kevin Wasielewski said that the Steam Machine brand is “pretty much dead.”

STAT | 10% – Amount that revenue from the Japanese console market (combining hardware and software) dropped in 2014; the total revenue is at its lowest point in 20 years, with hardware falling faster than software

QUOTE | “A lot of people are really negative about it at the moment and it’s a real shame because, actually, it’s a real opportunity for the smaller studios to innovate and do exciting things.” – Developer Hutch’s CEO Shaun Rutland, explaining why they left AAA development to work on free-to-play mobile games

QUOTE | “My programming skills are so tied to an aging and abandoned development platform that making even a niche title like my previous games is a dubious proposition at best.” – Solium Infernum Developer Vic Davis, talking about why he’s decided to switch to making board games

STAT | 8.51 million – Number of concurrent users on Steam on January 4, setting a new record for Valve; the most played game on Steam, by far, is DotA 2, with more than 835,000 players at its peak

QUOTE | “Goodbye Microsoft. It was a good run. Xbox was Great! Time to do something new.” – Boyd Multerer, creator of Xbox Live and XNA at Microsoft, tweeting goodbye to the company after 17 years

QUOTE | “We hold EA’s use of the former players’ likenesses is not incidental because it is central to EA’s main commercial purpose – to create a realistic virtual simulation of football games involving current and former NFL teams.” – Circuit Judge Raymond Fisher, explaining in his ruling why he’s allowing the lawsuit by former NFL players against EA to proceed

STAT | $10 billion – Amount that iOS app developers were paid by Apple in 2014; the App Store brought in a record $500 million in the first week of 2015, and January 1 was the biggest single day in App Store history

image via shutterstock