QUOTE | “We go to Sega and the board turned it down, which I thought was the stupidest decision ever made in the history of business.” – Former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, talking about the deal he had with Sony to share in the development of a new console
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “So is match-fixing a problem? Absolutely it’s a problem.” – Twitch COO Kevin Lin, talking about the growing pains of eSports and why eSports will continue to grow despite such issues
QUOTE | “It’s getting harder to be an indie, to even be competitive or be noticed – it feels like our industry is pushing super behemoth giant projects like the GTAs and the Destinys.” – Fun Bits CEO Chris Millar, talking about the grim realities and excitement of independent development
QUOTE | “We could be making a lot more money per user. But, you know what? We don’t want to.” – Hipster Whale’s Matt Hall, talking about their mobile hit Crossy Road and why they aren’t pushing monetization
STAT | 500,000 – Number of copies of Minecraft sold on PlayStation in Japan, across the PS4, PS3 and PS Vita; more than 200,000 of those copies have been sold on the PS Vita since it was released in October 2014
QUOTE | “It’s not like people don’t want to spend money, they want to spend money on things that they love and they want to be charged honestly.” – Neil Young, former CEO of mobile developer ngmoco, talking about why his new company N3twork has shifted from entertainment to producing games
QUOTE | “Most people are going to want to have the world available to them within a split second.” – CastAR co-founder Jeri Ellsworth, talking about the problems facing virtual reality and augmented reality
QUOTE | “A lot of people seem to be defining ‘Casual’ as a free-to-play game with ads and as many millions of users as they can get.” – Daniel Fountain of Lumino City developer State of Play, talking along with other developers about the state of casual gaming
STAT | 750 hours – The average amount of DotA 2 playtime among the top 25% of DotA 2 players, according to EEDAR; the number of DotA 2 copies installed has increased 85% over the past year to 42.9 million
STAT | 63% – Amount of digital revenue for console games in January claimed by PlayStation consoles worldwide, according to SuperData; the top title was GTA V, which brought in $31.8 million from digital downloads in January
QUOTE | “It would be far more damaging to rush to release a product that wasn’t ready and cause another failed attempt to launch VR into the mainstream.” – Tammeka producer Sam Watts, talking about the uncertainties and delays of developing VR title Radial-G Racing Revolved
Top image via Shutterstock.
