What's happened in the business of video games this past week ...
QUOTE | "Do consumers still care about Kinect?"—Veteran games journalist Johnny Minkley tackles the tough questions surrounding the Xbox business and whether Xbox 360 is even catering to the core at this point.
QUOTE | "Sony has bigger problems than a Vita price cut can solve."—Asif Khan, CEO of Panoptic Management Consultants, along with other analysts talking about how Sony can sell more PS Vitas.
QUOTE | "The best-case scenario for social gaming is for the term itself to disappear."—Soren Johnson, game designer who's worked on Civ 4 and Spore, talking about why he left EA for Zynga and the future of social games.
QUOTE | "I'm not saying it's excusable, but I think it's indicative of a larger problem in our industry."— Rachel Weber, GamesIndustry International writer, talking with other GI.biz writers about Diablo III and its early problems.
STAT | 13.4%—Amount Zynga's stock dropped after the Facebook IPO began, coming close to the lowest point ever in the stock's brief history.
QUOTE | "Recent iterations have not been as fun when compared to those of the past."—Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, talking about the latest versions of Sonic and other views on games and next-gen hardware.
QUOTE | "They're hoping that pandas and Pokemon clones will keep the franchise breathing until Titan arrives."—Steve Peterson, West Coast Editor for GamesIndustry International, talking about what Activision Blizzard is doing with World of Warcraft expansions to keep subscribers. [EDITOR's NOTE: This link originally pointed to an article about EA. We apologize for the error.
QUOTE | "Potentially we have a ... a new target for direct ports of existing 360/PS3 games."—Richard Leadbetter, tech specialist at Eurogamer, talking about the new mobile GPUs coming to smartphones and tablets later this year.
QUOTE | "Backwards compatibility, the ability to play pre-owned or shared games, and a physical drive."—The three key features GameStop says its survey of gamers revealed they want in next-generation consoles.
STAT | $239.9 million—Amount THQ lost during its fiscal year that ended in March, on total sales of $830.8 million for the year.
QUOTE | "We don't want to kill off bricks and mortar retail."—Mike Kennedy, CEO of EKG, the used game retailer that wants to give 10% of used game sales to publishers, talking about the difficulty of giving publishers money.
QUOTE | "This will allow big games to truly have the types of huge debuts that we see with Hollywood blockbusters."— David Perry, CEO of Gaikai, talking about the new Nvidia technology which will allow high-quality streaming games on TVs, tablets and even Facebook.
QUOTE | "Tablet users are gravitating towards gaming as the primary use for the device."—Taken from a survey of over 3500 people across the USA from Magid & Associates about gaming trends and attitudes.
This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International
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