Your Game Industry In Your Words: Week Of December 9

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures such as Pandemic Studios' former CEO Josh Resnick, Sega's Toshihiro Nagoshi, Rayman creator Michael Ancel, and many others.] In our original and exclusive interviews, analysis, and feature pieces over the past week, a wide variety of developers, publishers, and indies shared their thoughts with Gamasutra about topics like Pandemic Studios' fall, management problems at Gamepro, and preventing your game from rampant piracy in Russia. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "The timing and the reasons why we sold to EA totally made sense. And strangely, even make sense today. I know that's an odd thing to say, when Pandemic is no more. But I think a lot of things happened at once." -- Pandemic Studios' former president and co-founder Josh Resnick reflecting on the studio's closure "I think that if you could marry that together better, that sense of difficulty and progression from the gameplay standpoint, with the narrative -- that's the next horizon of games." -- Chair Entertainment co-founder Donald Mustard "The management had a very strong 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' vibe -- to a fault, because even when we did feel things were broken and needed fixing, we couldn't make positive change." -- Former Gamepro senior editor Dan Amrich on the now defunct magazine's past management problems "I doubt I would leave this company in 10 or even 20 years." -- Toshihiro Nagoshi, producer of the Super Monkey Ball and Yakuza series at Sega "Not really worried about that." -- Tekken chief producer and director Katsuhiro Harada, when asked if he was concerned about the series suffering overexposure with five upcoming releases "Studios and companies are disintegrating and then re-forming in a much faster lifecycle. People are continuing to find opportunities and grow really fast, but sometimes they hit the buffers, or they get as far as they can go." -- Zoe Mode veteran Ed Daly arguing the merits of games consultancies like his new firm Tenshi Consulting "If your game is released here one week later than in the rest of the world, expect to lose 20-30 percent of your sales. If it's two to four weeks late, expect to lose 50 percent of sales." -- 1C Company's Interactive Entertainment VP Nikolay Baryshnikov explaining why timing for game releases is crucial in Russia due to rampant piracy "It is too expensive and takes too long to make a high quality Facebook game that compares with the top games now. It costs too much to acquire users. Games peak and start to decline within a few months… I just don't believe that it makes for a sustainable business anymore." -- The Playforge's Tami Baribeau "I will tell you something terrible -- I don't really enjoy playing Mario games. I don't like gliding, I don't like its inertia, and I don't like not being able to give some slaps! It's a fabulous series, and I understand that people love it, but it's not my cup of tea." -- Michael Ancel explaining why the Mario series wasn't a huge inspiration for his Rayman games "It's pretty hard to make a case that the largest IPO by an online company since Google's 2004 Wall Street debut is disappointing, no matter how much you might hate FarmVille." -- Gamasutra editor-at-large Chris Morris on why Zynga's lower than expected IPO isn't disappointing The complete versions of these in-depth articles, as well as other insightful pieces, are all available in Gamasutra's pages for Exclusive items and Features.