Epic Blames PC Piracy for Its Focus on Consoles

May 18, 2010 9:00 AM

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Piracy is responsible for Gears of War developer Epic Games' waning enthusiasm for the PC, CVG spotted president Mike Capps saying in this month's issue of Edge.

"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," he said.

"If you walked into this place six years ago, Epic was a PC company and always had been. We did one PS2 launch title, which was a port of Unreal Tournament, and everything else was PC," Capps reminisced. "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 console."

Capp echoes similar comments he made before the release of Unreal Tournament 3 at GDC 2007, an event where Doom developer id Software's CEO Todd Hollenshead revealed "Piracy has pushed id as being multiplatform." Crysis developer Crytek has also cited piracy as the reason behind its decision to stop developing PC exclusives.

As for what the future holds for PC gaming, Capps highlights microtransaction-driven casual gaming. "Most publishers I'm speaking to right now think their money's going to be shifting back to PC and away from traditional consoles," he explains, "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."

Alice O'Connor

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charliepreed

 reply
May 18, 2010 9:02 AM

Oh yeah of course. It's not because Unreal Tournament 3 was shit and Gears of War bland and childish? Problem is Pc gamers matured and Epic didn't.
- at0micgarden
  
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  May 18, 2010 9:07 AM
  
  Can't speak for Gears of War, but UT3 was not shit at all. Nobody bought it, but it's definitely a very good game.
  - fractured_sanity
    
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    May 18, 2010 9:13 AM
    
    Maybe he meant UT2003 :P
    - stelth
      
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      May 18, 2010 9:18 AM
      
      I think he is. I bought UT2k3 coz it was awesome.
  - flasher 907
    
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    May 18, 2010 9:23 AM
    
    i bought it, and it was ok but far from great.
    
    it was all downhill after ut2k4
  - FIGHTheSYSTM
    
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    May 18, 2010 10:04 AM
    
    I own it and play it and enjoy it. But I wouldn't necessarily call it a good game. It doesn't offer anything besides graphics over UT2004 and the original UT. The gameplay is the same as it was 10 years ago. Why buy the new one when you can just play the old one. I only picked it up because it was onsale for $10.
- Dynotaku
  
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  May 18, 2010 9:09 AM
  
  The weekly UT3 Shackbattles show how wrong you are.
- LovermanOwens
  
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  May 18, 2010 9:12 AM
  
  says the pirate...
- Pandilex
  
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  May 18, 2010 9:14 AM
  
  I agree, UT 3 was -awful- , it was basically the original game with better graphics... Not much surprise a rebranded ancient game failed.
  - roont
    
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    May 18, 2010 9:19 AM
    
    any unreal tournament since the first one has been crap. Its just hectic chaotic jumping around and firing as many times a second as you can.
    
    pc piracy is not as bad as everyone says, just because it was pirated, does NOT mean that anyone would have bought it at all if they didnt have the option to pirate.
    
    most pirated games are played for all of 20 minutes or so and then shelved cause they are crap games.
- ajvitaly
  
   reply
  May 18, 2010 9:18 AM
  
  1. Gears was OK, but it was on console 8 months before PC.
  2. UT3 is good now, but it took over a year after release to get to that point.
  
  Both of those scenarios are a setup for failure on any platform.
  - DscytheX
    
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    May 18, 2010 9:25 AM
    
    ^This. I love UT3 and had it released with the content that the black edition patch came with I think it would have done much better.
- Deathstalker2015
  
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  May 18, 2010 9:19 AM
  
  So why does a shitty game mean that pirating it is ok? If your reasoning is that you don't want to spend $60 on a shitty game, fine - don't play it. But claiming that it was ok to pirate it because the game was bad is just bullshit that pirates use to try to somehow justify what is an illegal act.
  - duffman03
    
     reply
    May 18, 2010 9:31 AM
    
    He never said pirating was okay, just that that's why Epic didn't make any money on those games on PC. When nobody buys your game cus it sucks, and the pirates be pirates and steal it, it looks an awful lot like pirates are taking away your business.
  - ease one
    
     reply
    May 18, 2010 10:35 AM
    
    Thats not what he said but pirating is a way to protect yourself from getting scammed out of you money by a bad game.
- zehoo
  
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  May 18, 2010 9:33 AM
  
  Bought UT3 but the weapons and maps were so so.
  Never picked up gears because of reports of game breaking bugs in the pc version that still aren't fixed. That and I don't have a fetish for super pumped homo erotic army guys.
- st4rdog
  
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  May 18, 2010 9:54 AM
  
  Exactly. If they didn't have GoW Epic would only have their engine sales to keep them afloat.
  
  UT3 was a terrible game. We got UT2004 divided by 2, and somehow it took them years to do it. Idiots.
- rottdcorpse
  
   reply
  May 18, 2010 10:15 AM
  
  This. Piracy my ass. Bunch of console kiddies.