QUOTE | “You look at the relatively thin field at the top and we’ve sort of died and gone to heaven in terms of the opportunity.” – Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, explaining that they see themselves as #3 out of only four companies making AAA games
Elsewhere in the business of gaming this week…
QUOTE | “And suddenly every monster game is like all the other one[s], and cost a lot to make…The AAA industry definitely has to pause and question the current recipe.” – Former Ubisoft exec Jade Raymond, talking about why we need more innovation in AAA games and how to encourage it
QUOTE | “Our first-party lineup is a little sparse this year, so I think this places even greater emphasis on getting good third-party support.” – Sony Computer Entertainment head Andrew House, talking about Sony’s plans for the coming year
QUOTE | “We believe greed, fear, and the potential to change the world are going to drive VR/AR.” – Analysts at Macquarie Securities, talking about how games will be the launchpad for VR and AR, though the timing is uncertain
QUOTE | “We are looking at an all-in price, if you have to go out and actually need to buy a new computer and you’re going to buy the Rift… at most you should be in that $1,500 range.” – Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, explaining what it will cost to experience VR with his company’s hardware
QUOTE | “Our first thought was, ‘It’s been fun. We can now go and deliver pizzas for the rest of our lives.’” – Tiny Bull Studios CEO Matteo Lana, talking about how they felt when they learned former Irrational Games devs launched a Kickstarter for a game that sounded exactly like the one they’d been working on for a year
QUOTE | “If you want a free-to-play game to be successful, it has to be genuinely free – people have to be able to play forever without purchase. That’s just a general design rule, but it’s also completely contradictory. How can you make money from a game designed to be free?” – Veteran designer Pascal Luban, talking about how the design process is so different for F2P games
QUOTE | “There will be some very big clients on both the brand side and the gaming side who will be spending alone in one year $500 million – even up to $1 billion – just on mobile video ads.” – LoopMe’s Stephen Upstone, talking about how mobile game companies are spending huge amounts on marketing
QUOTE | “It’s a hard and demanding task, you’re always on top of your game, you’re always creatively thinking, but that’s actually the only thing that’s worth it in this business, being a game developer.” – Croteam’s Damjan Mravunac, talking about working as an indie developer
STAT | 8.5% – Amount that GameStop’s net income rose (to $73.8 million) for the quarter ended May 2, while revenue rose 3.2% to $2.06 billion; the company said it was due to a 9.6% rise in new software sales, and that GameStop captured a 45% share of the new software market
STAT | 50% – Amount that revenue from games on Google Play has increased since last year, according to Google; Japan is the leading company in mobile game revenue for Google Play, followed by the USA
QUOTE | “For me, as a game developer for a long time and also an entrepreneur, it’s just such an amazing opportunity. I call this the renaissance of gaming.” – Veteran developer Jon Van Caneghem, talking about his new studio VC Mobile Entertainment, making games for gamers on mobile devices
