QUOTE | "The Kickstarter experience had been wading in a sea of love ... it was like being dumped from that into this cold pool of Internet Twitter hate."—Tim Schafer of Double Fine, on the backlash to the announcement that the Kickstarter-funded Broken Age game would be split into two parts.
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week ...
QUOTE | "TV ads today are chum in the water. It attracts customers, then reel them in with digital media."—Electronic Arts' Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore, on the lessons EA has learned as it transitions more to digital games.
QUOTE | "When strangers on the Internet attack you en masse, it can be a surreal experience, and it can affect you in a very emotional way."—Dustin Hendricks, designer/programmer at Last Life Games, talking along with other developers about the lessons of Flappy Bird.
STAT | 175—Number of licensees to Activision's hit Skylanders franchise, which now includes General Mills and Crayola; Skylanders has brought in more than $2 billion at retail so far.
QUOTE | "I suspect the idea of another multi-year effort to take BioShock to the next level was really daunting to contemplate."—IDC analyst Lewis Ward, commenting along with other analysts on Take-Two's decision to close down Irrational Games.
QUOTE | "Male heroes should no longer be the default."—Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone, on why developers should question their design choices.
QUOTE | "It's really hard on mobile, and we experienced this ourselves, the paid market is almost non-existent."—Michael Schade, CEO of Rockfish Games, on why they left off doing mobile games after more than ten years to work on console games.
QUOTE | "That's my worry at this point, that indie is getting so professional, so big, that we're actually standing in the spotlight of a lot of smaller independent studios."—Vlambeer's Rami Ismail on the huge rise in the indies scene and the problems associated with that growth.
STAT | 36%—Amount of the US population that plays downloaded games on either a PC or a console, according to NPD; some 16% say they only play digitally distributed games and never buy discs anymore.
QUOTE | "NBA 2K14 is the fastest-selling NBA game in history ... 2K has figured out how to crack the code."—Vicky Picca, senior vice president of merchandising for the National Basketball Association, on how the NBA gets a big boost from video games.
QUOTE | "We're a bunch of nerds of varying tastes who set out to create a game full of things that we really enjoyed."—Molly Carroll of Chucklefish Games, on who they are and why their space-crafting game Starbound is going well.
This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International
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