Your Game Industry In Your Words: Week Of December 23

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures such as Grasshopper's Goichi Suda, Unity's David Helgason, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh, and more in this new weekly roundup.] 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 with Gamasutra about topics like why you can't ignore Adobe Flash, the worst things to happen to the game industry in 2011, and arcade lessons for free-to-play. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "For whatever shortcomings they may have or may not have, they still have an insanely large userbase, and that's not going away anytime soon." -- Unity CEO David Helgason explaining why Adobe's existing Flash install base is too large to ignore "These levels have then to be thoroughly designed, each centimeter has to be perfect, gameplay-wise." -- Arcade veteran turned free-to-play developer Xavi Fradera on what the two development styles have in common "Your target audience is the platform holder." -- Spilt Milk Studios's Andrew Smith explaining that an indie developer's audience isn't necessarily its players "It has killed the device casual platform like the DS and the PSP, and it has taken a $35 business and made it a $3 business. The economics have really changed. It's hurt revenue from that standpoint and changed the entire economic model." -- MKM Partners analys Eric Handler discusses the downside of smartphone gaming's rise "I think there are several conditions a new IP has to meet in order to succeed, and we just didn't meet them. You really need a lot of power, a big push on your side, in order to make a new IP succeed these days. I can certainly understand why it's more important for a title like Battlefield 3 to be successful, too." -- Grasshopper Manufacture CEO Goichi Suda on Shadows of the Damned's commercial flop "We think there's a future for the technology, and that's why we're investing in it and launching our HTML5 games on Google+." -- Gameloft's Publishing VP Baudouin Corman on HTML5 games with 3D graphics "Unlike a lot of other game companies that, once they launch a game, downsize their teams radically, our plan is to keep the team together and continue to focus on building content." -- Star Wars: The Old Republic's creative director James Ohlen "It's interesting, but it's also tough." -- Yukio Futatsugi describing what it's like to create Project Draco for Kinect "It's just a word that when people hear 'publishing', they have some preconceptions of it, and we don't agree with all of that. It's so loaded, and the word breathes 'old model', and we want to reinvent the publishing model in a way that fits for Mojang." -- Carl Manneh, CEO of Cobalt publisher and Minecraft maker Mojang "The worst thing that happened to the industry is it became the target of dickhead hackers." -- Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter 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.