Creativity first, business second, says Rockstar

Vice president of creativity at Rockstar Games Dan Houser also took a swipe at the way his competitors market their games, while also stressing the increasing cultural relevance of video games in an extensive interview on

Variety’s games blog.

A lot of our competitors in the game sphere – all they want to talk about is business," he told Variety. "Because they have creative guys making the games but they run it like, how can we compete?” We want to kill that stuff in some ways. We want to have very successful launches. We’ve had successful launches before but our angle is always creativity.”

Mainly because we’re in a position where we see games slowly gaining credibility as an art form as a medium. A lot of other people want to purely look at that from a business angle. For those of us who spend years slaving over making the thing, the thing isn’t We make this much money.” That isn’t interesting. The thing is, Does it resonate with people and take an interesting place in their cultural fabric?" That’s an interesting story to us.”

I often – without mentioning any names – think some of our big competitor titles, their marketing campaign is, Look at our great marketing campaign!” Ours is, Look at the game, experience the game hopefully.” Then we want to have further conversations with people once they play the game properly. But the two things we want to avoid are talking purely about this as a business—its not, this is a creative activity.”

Take a look at the full interview here.