“You have to look at a product from every angle. What is the product's genre? What are the platforms? How much money are you going to spend? Who are the people that are building it? Is it a licensed product? Is it an original product? You then present the idea to the green lighting committee, which is, like the senior management in sales, senior management in marketing, and product development. And then, basically, you run the numbers. And it's a numbers game after that. If the unit volume comes back and it supports the development [costs] and what you'll need to spend at marketing, then the product is given the green light.”
“They controlled the talent. They controlled the directors. Everybody was under contract, and for the longest time there seemed to be a stifling of creativity underneath that system. What the games industry is finding now is while you can amass an extraordinary collection of talent, extraordinary games are created within small teams. The best new intellectual properties are coming from independent--self-funded for the most part--studios.”
“The biggest challenge for us was that the lead SKU was the Xbox. So when you look at the unit volumes and you look at the genre of the product, that was a little bit challenging because there weren't a lot of character action games that had done well on Xbox.”
