Your game industry in your words, week of GDC Online

Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures from the past week, including Linden Labs' Emily Short, Wing Commander's Chris Roberts (pictured), Valve's Marc Laidlaw, 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 diversity in the game industry, the future of free-to-play, silent protagonists, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "Indies are going to be a big part of the beginning of this, and certainly the whole process, but especially the beginning." - Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe on developer support for his company's virtual reality headset "I'm an enormous believer in having creative tools that are available to indies with no money, to people who are not part of the industry, who do not have a stake in it, do not have special sources of access. Because that's how we get the additional voices that we need." - Linden Labs creative director Emily Short "Where free-to-play is going is massive, global games, made by very small groups of people that can get onto a billion phones and, essentially, make a lot of money. The video game industry has never seen this kind of leverage before." - Machine Zone CEO Gabe Leydon on the future of free-to-play "It's not that I can't get somebody to give me money to make the game. It's just that I would be making a different kind of game [if I went another path]." - Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts explains why he's crowdfunding his latest project "You don't ever want to be wordy in a social game, you never want to be philosophical or anything like that. There might be a place for that, but not in any games that I can think of." - Indiana Jones Adventure World designers Steve Williams and Jonathon Myers "People at the studios look at a video game, see the animated sequence, and think it looks like a movie, so how hard can it be to turn it into a film? It's actually quite difficult." - Resident Evil movie director Paul W.S. Anderson "Straight white developers, make games that straight white reviewers market to straight white players, who may eventually be recruited to become the new straight white developers and reviewers." - Ann Anthropy (Dys4ia) describes what she sees as the typical game development cycle "[Creating a silent protagonist] is not something I would recommend" - Valve writer Marc Laidlaw "Games can be meaningful, beautiful in the way these other things are, but their meaning and beauty is actually quite different." - Zynga New York creative director Frank Lantz 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.