This Week In The Business: Basically Dead

QUOTE | “Most developers never really made money. They were able to stay in the business. But the way the deals were structured, they were basically dead.” – Oddworld founder Lorne Lanning, talking about why capitalism is killing games

Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “At BioWare, we spent our careers getting people to sit on their butts for hundreds and hundreds of hours. So now this is a way to get kids off their butts and get them outside.” – Greg Zeschuk, co-founder of BioWare, talking about his new game company Biba that creates mobile games for playground time

QUOTE | “I do not like to use the term ‘Free-to-play. I have come to realize that there is a degree of insincerity to consumers with this terminology, since so-called ‘Free-to-play’ should be referred to more accurately as ‘Free-to-start’.” – Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, talking about some of his concerns with making mobile games

QUOTE | “It’s always been massively frustrating to me, the ‘me too’ attitude of many publishers.” – Kuju Entertainment’s Gary Bracey, talking about why they’ve moved from work-for-hire to publishing games

QUOTE | “We were like, ‘Wow, this is it.’ This is the future. Then we decided to bet it all on VR.” – Minority Media creative director Vander Caballero, explaining why the Papo & Yo developer is now developing VR games

QUOTE | “The decision for us to be on the Super Bowl was decided by a bunch of guys in a hot tub while we were on an offsite.” – Supercell media lead Jimmy Lee, explaining why Supercell created the Super Bowl ad starring Liam Neeson

STAT | $1.7 billion – Amount of money Supercell made in 2014 from its hit mobile games, according to the company’s earnings report; this is triple its 2013 revenue, and their profits more than doubled to $565 million

QUOTE | “I think the issue with whales is that most developers don’t actually psychologically get into the head of whales. And as a result, they don’t actually empathize with those players.” – Boss Fight Entertainment’s Damion Schubert, talking about why we should use the term “patrons” instead

QUOTE | “The seven-year upgrade lifecycle doesn’t work in the face of the two-year upgrade cycles for every other hardware platform. It’s so intrinsically built into how consoles get manufactured… I’d be surprised to see another generation.” – Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, talking about why he expects console generations to change form

QUOTE | “As you play games, you get impact points and you’re able to use those impact points for causes you care about.” – Tom Kang, CEO of new mobile game company Zig Zag Zoom, talking about how they plan to have game players be social activists

STAT | 2.8% – Amount GameStop revenues rose in 2014, according to the company’s earnings report; new hardware sales were up 17%, but new game software sales dropped 11% for the year

STAT | 3.7% – Amount digital console game sales dropped in February versus February of last year, according to SuperData; Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare brought in the most money at $31.6 million

Top image via Shutterstock