Satoru Iwata Quotes

I'm not a big fan of free to play. And this is just me, but when I buy something, I don't like the idea that I start playing for free, but each time I want to do something a little more interesting or progress, I have to pay. I'd rather pay up front.

Free-to-play isn't a business model. Free-to-play is a marketing strategy. It's a way to get people over the hump of trying out your game. It gets rid of the friction that happens when you charge an upfront fee.

The only thing I think that is wrong with modern gaming now is the free-to-play stuff on mobile phones. I think it's very cynical and cold and weird.

To people who traditionally charge $10,000 for a 3D animating app, we say you should be free-to-play and generate a revenue stream. Think of a 3D modeling package almost like an RPG.

There's a myth that free-to-play is cheaper than a $60 game. It's just elastic. For some users, it winds up being a lot more expensive. I would have paid $150 a year to get a better version of FIFA.

We allow the top developers whose games are being played millions of times to translate that into U.S. dollars.

When we approach games, we're always emotional-focused, so if a free-to-play business model works against the emotion, we won't use it. If it actually works well with the emotion, or if we can come up with a new way to do monetization that's different and that's unique for the game, I would go for that.

In the free-to-play industry, the most money-making games are often coming from making people fighting against each other and really hating each other and wanting to revenge, so they spend more money to dominate.

Asian online games are far ahead of Western games in terms of business model, but the Western games do have a real advantage in terms of production values.

I think free-to-play is both exciting and also really dangerous.

A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it's the most ridiculous concept.

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

In some respects, the video-game business is a lot like the razor business, which follows a simple model: Give away the razor, gouge 'em on the price of the blades.

The question I ask myself is what would have happened if newspapers hadn't initially given their content away for free on the Internet. It's so hard to get people to pay once they are accustomed to having something for free.

Truth is, people like buying things for $0.99 and $1.99 for their digital devices. We know that from iTunes. We know that from the app store, and now we know that from publishing.

It's extremely hard to build a company with a product that everyone loves, is free and has no business model, and then to innovate a business model. I did that with Kazaa, had half a billion downloads but that wasn't a sustainable business.

If people use Chrome, we make less money on our service and that's fine by us because that is fair competition. I wouldn't put Google on a pedestal for competition, but they aren't telling users not to use OpenDNS.

We knew when we started the Daily Muse, we wanted a recruiting-focused business model rather than an advertising-focused one. We felt like publishers were being forced to go to more and more extreme lengths to monetize through advertising.

If Youku had adopted YouTube's business model, we just would not be here. We would not exist.

Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.

Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.

Subscriptions is the bulk of our business; ads are nice to have on top of that.

I think, at the end of the day, Stockhouse will have free services supported by advertising, but we'll also have a number of subscription services.

We started having more developers who wished they could develop on Roblox forever, but they were starting to go off to Google and get jobs. It struck us that this whole platform play, where the creators were powering the fun, we could wrap it into powering the monetization as well.