STAT | $3.2 billion - Sony’s gaming revenue for the quarter ended June 30, up 15% year-over-year as its software sales surged and PS4 production costs shrank.
Elsewhere in the business of gaming this week...
STAT | $585 million - Nintendo’s revenues for the quarter ended June 30, down 31% year-over-year as its hardware sales were almost halved. The company also posted a $232 million loss in the quarter.
STAT | $152 million - Microsoft’s gaming revenue for the quarter ended June 30, down 9% year-over-year as console hardware sales dropped by nearly a third.
QUOTE | “You don’t get paid for being the first to market, you don’t sell more units. The installed base is too small.” - Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick explains why he doesn’t care if his company is late hopping aboard the VR bandwagon.
QUOTE | “We did mess around with VR, but never successfully. I cancelled the introduction of VR when I was at Sega because it made everyone sick, basically.” Tom Kalinske, Sega CEO during the company’s Genesis heyday and new Gazillion chairman, noting that many of today’s biggest trends have been around in some form for decades.
QUOTE | “It’s weird to me that there seems to be such a big division between what people see as mobile VR and the rest of VR. Mobile VR is much more about VR than it is about mobile. To me, it doesn’t feel like a phone game; it feels like a VR game. It’s more like Oculus Rift than it’s like your cellphone.” -Otherworld Interactive CEO Andrew Goldstein, questioning the boundaries we draw around VR.
STAT | 1 million - Monthly active users of the Oculus-designed Gear VR system, according to Facebook.
STAT | 1 billion - The number of iPhones Apple has sold to date. The world’s population is estimated at about 7.3 billion.
QUOTE | “I couldn’t tell you who the top ten hundred metres runners are right now but the Olympics are coming up and I’m certainly going to watch the hundred metres.” - Spike Laurie, UK co-managing director for the ESL, explains why he thinks eSports could appeal to people who don’t play or follow games.
QUOTE | “Slowly, over the next five years, [Microsoft] will force-patch Windows 10 to make Steam progressively worse and more broken. They’ll never completely break it, but will continue to break it until, in five years, people are so fed up that Steam is buggy that the Windows Store seems like an ideal alternative.” - Epic Games president lays out how he believes Microsoft will use Universal Windows Platform to make PCs effectively a closed platform.
QUOTE | “An interesting creative challenge is a plus. A huge pile of money is a big plus. In the meantime, I’m open to consulting work while I try to sort everything out.” - Legendary developer Steve Meretzky lays out what he wants out of his next job after restructuring at GSN Games this week put him back on the market.
QUOTE | “We don’t regret doing it, but we said to ourselves that we don’t want to go through that experience again.” - Blue Isle Studios’ Alex Tintor, discussing the Slender: The Arrival studio’s decision to create free content for fans upset that scenes featured in the original trailer were cut before the game’s release. The studio has worked on Valley for three years, but only announced it in April because it wanted to be certain everything shown would make the final game.