Your game industry in your words, week of September 21

Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures from the past week, including Media Molecule's David Smith, Valve's Robin Walker, Keiji Inafune, 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 subtractive design, game studio culture, Japanese developers on Steam, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "Team Fortress 2 has been ended up being one of the most useful tools we've ever built to reduce risk in our company's future." - Valve lead designer Robin Walker on using Team Fortress 2 as a guinea pig for new business ideas "It's a very creative act to remove things. In some ways, adding things can be the easy option. Everybody likes new ideas. But figuring out which to remove -- I think you talk to anyone that makes games, and this is the common basis of anguish and pain." - David Smith, lead designer on Media Molecule's Tearaway "There are always more people than controllers. So you start thinking of ways to entertain the people who are not holding controllers." - Hokra developer Ramiro Corbetta discusses designing games for public spaces "Every studio has some kind of culture, whether it's a good one or bad one, and that culture will largely decide the success of a studio or a team." - Sproing CEO Harald Riegler "If you have a bunch of people who aren't passionate about a project, then what good are they?" - Borderlands 2 level designer Carl Shedd "I think there needs to be a system that allows [Japanese developers] to be more creative in their work; that would help them a lot." - Capcom veteran Keiji Inafune on the Japanese game industry "My personal opinion is that [Steam] is one of the ways that Japan can still compete, as far as putting their games in front of users, and not having to spend huge mega-budgets. It can help them compete with Western publishers." - MarvelousAQL's Esteban Salazar "We don't attempt to be 3D; we never will be. The simplicity of game making is destroyed when you go to 3D." - YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan explains GameMaker's 2D focus "Ideas are the easy part. Getting from a good idea to something that's actually good is what's hard." - Gardens of Time creator Eric Todd 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.