Your game industry in your words, week of September 28

Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures from the past week, including Nintendo's former "gamesmaster" Howard Phillips, Monaco's Andy Schatz, 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 the Japanese industry's shrinkage, digital versus analog choices, "box dwellers," and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "If we stay at 99 cents, people will still play. Otherwise, from an industry point of view, you get this diminishing spiral where, the only reason you're really lowering the price is to take customers away from other developers." - Frontier Development founder David Braben "We actually got a lot of feedback from people who were playing it, saying, 'We want bigger breasts. Make the characters more like that.' That was kind of surprising." - Dead or Alive 5 director Yohei Shimbori on reactions to the toned down sexuality in the game's demo "That's one of the reasons we can be resilient: We don't have a big studio that, if it closed, the entire ecosystem would tank." - Bocoup community director Darius Kazemi comparing Boston to other game development hubs "I believe that [secrecy] did corrupt the Japanese game industry over the years." - Capcom veteran Keiji Inafune "The Box Dweller. Someone who immediately dismisses an idea because it wouldn't work within some other (often easily changeable) current constraint in the game." - One of several dozen new game developer flashcards identifying common personalities at studios "You should never, ever, ever be afraid to take a step back, look at your game, look at your development team, look at what you're doing, and consider a pivot." - Zynga With Friends CTO Vijay Thakkar "I had a totally different feeling watching a 7-year-old play Killer Instinct than I did watching a 7-year-old play Super Mario." - Former Nintendo "gamesmaster" Howard Phillips on how video games began to lose their innocence in the 1990s "What we need is something to pull people back, and right now what we have isn't enough." - Koei Tecmo executive Akihiro Suzuki on Japan's industry-wide shrinkage "If we don't think [an update] is exciting enough, or we find the messaging is hard to write, then we know the update needs more [content]." - Team Fortress 2 lead designer Robin Walker "Players tend to have a hard time making choices based upon a range of values, but if you give them the choice of A, B, or C, they have a much easier time strategizing about the optimal path forwards." - Pocketwatch Games Andy Schatz (Monaco) discusses the advantages of offering digital choices over analog choices 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.