On the back of the announcement that Grand Theft Auto III 10th Anniversary Edition will be coming to mobiles, Rockstar looks to be taking the mobile gaming scene seriously, with the further revelation that the seminal sandbox title will be hitting a variety of devices, not just the powerhouse that is the iPhone 4S.
But according to Rockstar's vice president of creativity Dan Houser, mobile gaming is guilty of flooding the games industry with quantity over quality, with money being too much of a focus.
A rich man's world
"This is my personal opinion, but I think a lot of people in the general mobile industry are more focused on making money than making good products," said Houser in an interview with Japan's Famitsu.
"We're a business, too - we have to think about how to build revenue and we value the knowledge you need for that, but we want to conduct business with superior products. Focusing on nothing but business is depressing to me; it's boring.
"I want people to understand that we make games for more than just to make money," he added.
Who needs strategy anyway?
Houser also went some way to outline the positive nature of Rockstar's lack of a mobile strategy.
"Our mobile strategy is not at all different from our console strategy - in other words, we don't have one," he said.
"Our focus is purely on making games that we can be confident on the quality of. We've never made something because we felt it was a business opportunity or because we thought there was some niche in the marketplace we could fill.
"I don't think mobile is going to swallow up video games, but it's an important topic. The massive phenomenon we saw when portable game systems came out has already spread over the mobile market, but we've experienced successes and failures in portables in the past."
[source: 1UP]
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When Matt was 7 years old he didn't write to Santa like the other little boys and girls. He wrote to Mario. When the rotund plumber replied, Matt's dedication to a life of gaming was established. Like an otaku David Carradine, he wandered the planet until becoming a writer at Pocket Gamer.
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