Your game industry in your words: Week of May 4

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from industry figures such as Creative Assembly's Tim Heaton, Sony Santa Monica's Chris Sutton, Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand, and many others in this 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 on horror games, cutting features, gross design, crunch periods, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "I think teams are really scared about doing 90 percent of the work and then cutting it. It's kind of like, 'Well, it's nearly finished; I... I've done all the work! Please don't cut it! I'm sure I can make it better.' And we're fairly brutal on that." - Creative Assembly studio director Tim Heaton on cutting weak features late in their development "If horror is all one-note - suspense and eventual relief, repeated as a cycle, it quickly loses its grip over me. The stuff I find most disturbing often has a mixture of the comic, the sentimental, all kinds of sensations other than fear." - Lone Survivor developer Jasper Byrne "They'll watch videos of actual autopsies and dissections to really understand how the human anatomy works, and the layering of muscles. They really get into their craft of creating characters." - God of War: Ascension art director Chris Sutton discusses his team's gross work "In the film industry, crew members are mandatorily and openly compensated for their extra effort. If a film goes into overages, it falls squarely on the shoulders of the producer and management, instead of punishing team members for unexpected events." - Film producer Tess Jones compares the game industry's crunch period to the movie industry's "Golden Time" "Ultimately, this is the best approach to doing business in the internet age." - TIGA CEO Dr. Richard Wilson on combating game piracy with the free-to-play model "I think of it almost as an Express Pass to the paid user. When I went to Universal Studios in Florida, and I really wanted to get into that Spider-Man ride, I bought an Express Pass so I could get to the front of the line. I went on the same ride as everyone else, but I got to get there faster." - Hi-Rez COO Todd Harris on letting Tribes: Ascend players unlock content faster with microtransactions "Older game forms don't go away. So when we talk about the 'evolution of games', I think that's misleading, because it implies that the older forms no longer exist." - Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner "U.S. publishers usually think Japanese developers can just make Nintendo platform console games, but those platforms are [declining]. Other big platforms like 360, PS3, and PC are getting bigger here, and they think Japanese developers cannot make big titles for those platforms." - Anonymous Tose developer on problems Japanese studios face with getting work from Western publishers "I'm a big believer that no matter what level you're working at on a project, it's a very great thing to be able to stay connected to the practical processes of building out a game." - Former Naughty Dog lead Richard Lemarchand, who just left the Uncharted studio to join USC's School of Cinematic Arts 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.