QUOTE | “At that point, we’re asking people to part with their money, and they should not be getting a broken product.” - Tripwire VP Alan Wilson, explaining why he thinks Steam’s Early Access program is being abused by some developers.
Elsewhere in the business of gaming this week...
QUOTE | “Optimization never stops. You can always do more - until you break.” - Veteran developer Jurie Horneman, talking about the endless work cycle facing game developers, whether indie or AAA, and the uncertainty of the market.
QUOTE | “AAA has always been fun for me, but I do ask myself, ‘when is the last time you have done something for the first time?’” - Remedy Entertainment CEO Matias Myllyrinne, explaining why he’s leaving the Quantum Break developer for a position at World of Tanks developer Wargaming.
STAT | 90 million – Number of monthly active users for League of Legends in April, the most for any MOBA according to SuperData; DoTA 2 was a distant second with 10.8 million monthly active users.
QUOTE | “It’s really crazy, I realize that... It’s a lot of work. I’m pretty sure it’s the biggest output of any dev at the moment.” - Eipix CEO Mirko Topalski, talking about how his 300-person studio is scheduled to release 25 hidden-object games in the next year.
QUOTE | “I see a lot of our business as almost brokering a truce between the content creator and the consumer.” - Humble Bundle co-founder John Graham, talking about how publishers often find it hard to offer games at a very low sale price without help like the Humble Bundle.
STAT | $500 million – Amount that Glu Mobile expects to be making annually in 2020 purely from celebrity endorsed mobile games; currently the company makes 30% of its revenue from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, and it’s signed deals with Katy Perry and Britney Spears.
QUOTE | “My core goal is to complete the game to the level of quality that we want and believe in, and then cover how we get the word out separately” - Ex-Irrational dev Bill Gardner, talking about the progress on his Kickstarter game Perception.
STAT | 11 million – Number of units sold so far for Bioshock Infinite, according to Take-Two; the company reported lifetime sales of the Bioshock franchise at 25 million units.
QUOTE | “Apple’s move shows that they’re serious about reversing the race to the bottom, and putting companies that treat players like cattle on the backseat.” - Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of Tinybuild, talking along with other developers about Apple’s recent changes to the App Store, removing algorithmically generated categories.
STAT | $93 billion – Forecast for the total revenue of the global game industry in 2019, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers; the firm estimates a compound annual growth rate of 5.7% until then, despite what it sees as a downturn in traditional consoles around 2017 or 2018.