This Week In The Business: Toys-To-Life To Death

STAT | 7% – The amount the toys-to-life US retail revenues grew in 2015, even with the introduction of a new major player in Lego Dimensions. The industry-tracking NPD Group believes the genre will shrink in 2016.

Elsewhere in the business of gaming this week…

QUOTE | “What’s happening in the current toys-to-life space is they’re not innovating. They’re not changing the game that much. And as a game player, when something doesn’t change, you just get tired of it.” – Jumo CCO Chris Esaki, explaining why the toys-to-life genre needs novel entries that target older age groups

QUOTE | “Gamers are bored. We haven’t had anything really new and exciting happen in gaming in, like, five years. Gamers are ready for something new. They’re hungry for it and they’re ready to spend on something new.” – Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell, on why he’s optimistic for VR

STAT | $3.6 billion – Research firm Superdata’s current estimate for the global VR market in 2016. It has been lowered twice since January, when the firm put its initial expectations at $5.1 billion.

QUOTE | “The number one challenge we have wrestled with is how to design camera, character control, and spaces that work well in VR.” – Insomniac Games’ Ted Price, explaining how working in VR requires you to rethink some of the most basic assumptions of game development

QUOTE | “We’ve played all the VR that’s come through our office, and the setup time for PlayStation VR is significantly easier and the space required to demo is small, so I expect we’ll have a lot of demos in stores, unlike the Oculus or HTC.” – GameStop CEO Paul Raines, throwing the specialty chain’s weight behind Sony’s VR headset

QUOTE | “We’ve been very close partners with publishers for the last two decades and that is our core business, AAAs. That is our bread and butter. So we’re not by any means going to risk that.” -GameStop exec Mark Stanley, explaining why the retailer’s decision to publish its own games doesn’t count as competition with publishers.

QUOTE | “We need to find other ways to talk about our games. We need to open up the discussion beyond our three animals.” – Veteran designer Don Daglow, calling shenanigans on the restrictive core/mid-core/casual labels for games

QUOTE | “The global community has been brought up on American content, American aesthetic and American storytelling… there are many global universal concepts we could come up with that will be very accessible to anyone in the world, and television and film content has proven that for the past 100 years.” – SGN president and COO Josh Yguado saying the hardest part of localization isn’t the content; it’s the marketing and distribution.

STAT | 22% – The percentage of women in a PwC survey who said they are involved with eSports, compared to just 18 percent of men.

STAT | 78.2 million – The last official Xbox 360 lifetime sales figure released by Microsoft. This week the company announced it was halting production on the console after more than 10 years

STAT | 18 million – The current Xbox One installed base, according to Gfinity CEO Neville Upton in a company press release. (After the number was taken as official, Gfinity released a clarification saying that its number was an estimate based on a variety of independent sources.)