This Week in the Business: ‘What a Bunch of Elitist B.S.’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “That idea of saying, ‘you’re not allowed.’ What a bunch of elitist bullshit. Go [expletive] yourself.”—David Jaffe, veteran designer, talking about consulting on a Kickstarter for Autoduel and why critics of some Kickstarters annoy him

QUOTE | “The downside didn’t appear until sometime later when we found it difficult to develop the games we wanted to do.”—Tony Goodman, founder of Ensemble Studios, talking about his company’s acquisition by Microsoft

QUOTE | “Is the crowd really wise or just mediocre, incapable of recognizing and rewarding the new and different?”—Veteran designer Warren Spector, talking about why Metacritic should be irrelevant

QUOTE | “A lot of those big companies that were the poster children for social games are really struggling now.”—Rob Small, CEO of MiniClip, talking about the difficulty of doing free-to-play games

QUOTE | “THQ was brilliant at what it did from 1991 to 2007.”—Former THQ exec Danny Bilson, talking about the downfall of THQ and how he felt terrible about it

QUOTE | “The serious gamers are much more stable, and they’re going to be around for a long time and will keep playing games.”—Legendary designer Sid Meier, explaining why he’s continuing to make games for a core audience, regardless of the platform

QUOTE | “There’s also a tension between headline-grabbing creative indie mavericks and ‘microstudios’ like ourselves.”—Paul Taylor of studio Mode 7, talking about making more traditional games on multiple platforms

STAT | $3.75 million —Amount of money mobile game Puzzle & Dragons was earning per day in April; publisher GungHo Entertainment’s market cap of $15.1 billion is now greater than Nintendo’s $15 billion

STAT | 25%—Drop in retail sales of games, game hardware and accessories in the US in April, versus sales in April 2012; software sales were down 17% and hardware sales dropped 42%

QUOTE | “I think people really are fairly thrilled about what we have now.”—ESA senior communications VP Rich Taylor, talking about why the E3 show is still vital to the game industry

This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International

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