Epic: "The Money's On Console"

19 May 2010 at 10:40:54 by Tim McDonald

Epic president Mike Capps has explained that the company's decision to shift focus from PC to console is down to piracy - but notes that things might be looking up.

In the latest Edge (via CVG), Capps reminisced a little. "If you walked into this place six years ago, Epic was a PC company and always had been," he said. "We did one PS2 launch title, which was a port of Unreal Tournament, and everything else was PC."

"And now, if you read our forums, people are saying: 'Why do you hate the PC? You're a console-only company.' And guess what? It's because the money's on the console," elaborated Capps. "We still do PC, we love the PC, but we already saw the impact of piracy: it killed a lot of great independent developers and completely changed our business model."

There might be a light at the end of the tunnel, though. "Most publishers I'm speaking to right now think their money's going to be shifting back to PC and away from traditional consoles," mused Capps, "just because folks are in that mode of wanting to spend a little bit of time every now and then, and paying money to save time because there's so much media competing for it."

"So maybe Facebook will save PC gaming - but it's not going to look like Gears of War," he concluded.

The last Epic game we saw on PC was Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007. Since then, we've seen Gears of War 2 and the co-developed Shadow Complex on console, with Gears of War 3 and Bulletstorm on the horizon.

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