Randy Pitchford: Games as a hobby trumps games a service
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Randy Pitchford started Gearbox back in 1999, and since that time, the company’s games such as the Borderlands series have sold more than 100 million copies. And Pitchford has come to believe that games as a hobby trumps games as a service, and he warned against putting something other than gamer’s interests first.
In a fireside chat with me at our second annual GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming Summit, Pitchford said that focusing on making fun matters more than anything else.
“I do believe that a huge component is the fundamental philosophy by which myself and the talented Gearbox team approaches what we do,” Pitchford said. “We think about our games as potential hobbies, as places where you want people to spend time and enjoy the time that they’re spending there. There’s obviously a business in this because it takes resources to make something with teams. But it’s always our ambition that the audience feels like they have the better end of the bargain.”
He added, “We want the relationship between us and the people that play our games to be the kind of relationship that entertainers have with their audiences, which is a contrast, to the kind of relationship that a tobacco company has with an addict. And we’ve seen business models in this industry [where] there can be some addictive qualities to interact with a very powerful medium. But we tend to always approach things from the customer perspective. And because we’re customers. I’ve literally spent my entire holiday just playing video games.”
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