Your game industry in your words, week of June 29

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures from the past week, including Epic Games' Tim Sweeney, Sony Online Entertainment's Jon Smedley, Spelunky's Derek Yu, 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 on Microsoft's new Surface tablet, underestimating the time it takes to program a game, the oft-ignored PSP Minis platform, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "If I was just starting a new company, I would consider targeting the Surface given that there's a chance to be a leader in a new market at its inception." - Tiger Style's Randy Smith considering whether Microsoft's new Surface tablet is worth developing for "There's a potential for mobile gaming to kill console gaming. I'm talking about a significant reduction of market share with no chance of return." - EA Dice veteran and Ngmoco general manager Ben Cousins "The ease of access with some of these new platforms is going to bring in a whole new pool of talented people, who up until now couldn't reach the bottom rung of the ladder." - Square Enix U.S. president and CEO on the new generation of game developers "The Nintendo influence was big, in a good way; at the same time it gave me confidence that if I really pushed my boundaries harder, then I can get to this level on my own." - The Last Story designer Takuya Matsumoto discussing the benefits of working with Nintendo's demanding QA team "The most profitable game we've ever made, in terms of man years invested versus revenue, is actually Infinity Blade. It's more profitable than Gears of War." - Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney "We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer. We have a lot of great creators in Square Enix, but for larger-scale development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach our targets on time." - Motomu Toriyama, director for Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 "For a simple, one-screen arcade game with a basic menu, my programming time clocked in at 109 hours." - Indie developer Matej Jan explaining how programmers can vastly underestimate the amount of time needed for even simple projects "It frustrates me that iOS is the flame the moths are flying towards -- ultimately they are doomed unless they've got enormous resources for visibility. Even though you might not win big on Minis, you're pretty much guaranteed to make some sales." - Futurlab's James Marsden, who just released a game to the PSP Minis platform "Everybody's making WoW 1.5. We're doing something else." - Sony Online Entertainment head John Smedley on EverQuest Next "In my opinion, it's always been the hardcore players that have moved gaming forward and it's their enthusiasm that paves the way for a larger audience. My hope is that casual players will see how much fun a tough game can be if it's designed well." - Spelunky XBLA creator Derek Yu 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.