Speak of the developer
Video games have become so huge that it's easy to lose sight of the individual people who keep this monstrous industry churning. Fortunately, they frequently make themselves heard with revelatory and/or insulting and/or inspiring words of wisdom. And if that wasn't enough, nearly everybody outside the industry seems to have something to say about them, too.
These are the folks that make covering games into more than assigning scores, and these are 25 of the most inspired and insipid things that they said over the past year.
"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."
- Former Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw significantly overstates SimCity's reliance on the cloud after significant launch issues.
"Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode. I cant make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect."
- Maxis Emeryville General Manager Patrick Buechner says offline SimCity may not be so impossible, after all.
"I would like to take the opportunity today to thank you for your assistance in helping us to reshape the future of Xbox One. You told us how much you loved the flexibility you have today with games delivered on disc. The ability to lend, share, and resell these games at your discretion is of incredible importance to you. Also important to you is the freedom to play offline, for any length of time, anywhere in the world."
- Former Xbox head Don Mattrick acknowledges Xbox One's sea change a week after E3.
"This is a great opportunity for Don, and I wish him success. I am incredibly proud of the work and vision culminating in Xbox One. I'm particularly excited about how Xbox pushes forward our devices and services transformation by bringing together the best of Microsoft."
- Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bids adieu to former Xbox head Don Mattrick after his departure for Zynga.
"So, we're waiting for the right time to re-introduce The Last Guardian in an appropriate way. I can't... Well, the game is in development, and it's well staffed, and [Team Ico head Fumito] Ueda-san is here, working--even though he's not a Sony employee, he's dedicated to the product. But we're not ready to update yet."
- SCE Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida gives a brief status update on the inter-generational legend, The Last Guardian.
"[A]s we've mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo's core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot."
- Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Production Director John Hight announces the end of Diablo 3's maligned auction house.
"We thought it was a cool way to package up online services and content. It never got off the ground. Consumers didn't like it. We listened to what they were saying and decided it wasn't worth doing it again...Consumers just didn't like it."
- EA senior VP of corporate communications Jeff Brown reveals that the early adopter of online passes is abandoning the system.
"We put considerable amount of effort in polishing and perfecting the game content for these titles, receiving extremely high Metacritic scores. However, we were very disappointed to see that the high scores did not translate to actual sales performance, which is where we see the substantial variance in operation profit/loss against the forecast."
- Former Square Enix President Yoichi Wada addresses the "disappointing" sales of Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution, and Sleeping Dogs.
"For a long time at Nintendo we didnt focus as much on online play because for many years doing so would have limited the size of the audience that could enjoy those features. But certainly now we see that so many people are connected to the Internet. It opens up a tremendous amount of possibilities."
- Shigeru Miyamoto explains why Nintendo waited until Wii U to embrace online play.
As a result of repeated dealings, today the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras informed Czech Prime Minister Petr Neas over the telephone that the two Czechs arrested by Greek police because of supposed photography of military objects on the island of Lemnos have been released. Both can now return back to the Czech Republic."
- The Czech Prime Minister's spokesperson announces that the two Arma 3 devs jailed for almost 130 days in Greece are free to come home.
"I really don't think anyone can understand just quite how exasperated that can make you feel when you've gambled everything on something, put your whole self and reputation on the line. So it hasn't made my life very pleasant and I disagree entirely with the conduct and how consumers have been treated."
- DayZ creator Dean Hall expresses anger at consumer confusion between his product and controversial free-to-play shooter The War Z, now known as Infestation: Survivor Stories.
"Congress should fund research on the effects that violent video games have on young minds We don't benefit from ignorance. We don't benefit from not knowing the science."
- U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the influence violent games allegedly had on Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza and other mass murderers.
"I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so its hard for me to design one thats much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. Theres just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is."
- Double Fine founder Tim Schafer addresses why his studio was unable to finish Broken Age with its substantial Kickstarter funds.
"Are we really the 'Worst Company in America?' I'll be the first to admit that we've made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn't meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this."
- EA COO Peter Moore responds to his company's second year as The Consumerist's Worst Company in America.
"Now it's been fifteen years, nine games, and an enormous blast to undertake. If it were my choice, I would do this role forever. To hear anyone else's voice coming from Snake's battered throat, makes me a little ill, to be honest."
- Longtime Metal Gear Solid voice actor David Hayter responds to Kiefer Sutherland taking his part in Metal Gear Solid 5.
"Our ambition from the start with Watch Dogs has been to deliver something that embodies what we wanted to see in the next-generation of gaming. It is with this in mind that we've made the tough decision to delay the release until Spring 2014."
- Ubisoft announces the delay of Watch Dogs, one of the first revealed and most-anticipated next-gen games, out of the PS4 and Xbox One launch window.
Right Said Dev
That's what they said. Now what say you? Let us know in the comments below which notable quotables had you rolling on the floor or fuming from your ears, and feel free to contribute your own selections.
And if you're looking for more navel-gazing from 2013, check out the worst box art of 2013 and the top 7 games you forgot came out in 2013.
