According to Epic Games president Mike Capps, the fledging gaming industry needs a bit more business savvy to go with the creative drive. He also believes that it’s better to share knowledge with one another to improve the industry overall.
"Our games industry is shockingly immature from a business perspective, because so few folks have business experience before coming in, or an education for business," he said in an interview with our sister site GI.biz.
"It's awesome because it's entrepreneurship gone right, that's what our industry comes from, and that's really exciting, but there's not a lot of sharing, there's not a lot of great game business 'how to' books, so we try to share and people listen to us, for some reason, and we try to learn as much as we can from everybody else and their mistakes. It just seemed like the right thing to do."
“If you find a bug, you don't go 'ha ha ha, that'll give us an edge on Splinter Cell!' Because it doesn't at all and so you share it, because it's one less thing that Epic has to find and fix and they can focus on something you care more about. And you share with the Mass Effect guys and they share with you,” he added.
Epic and the Unreal Engine are having some real success on iOS with Infinity Blade and its sequel, but what about Sony’s PlayStation Vita? Vita support is coming to Unreal Engine, but the publisher doesn’t have anything for the platform internally.
I'm just saying I'm not opposed to killing the God-King on Vita. Please.
"We're not currently making a Vita game, I'm not sure how well it's going to be accepted in our Western market which is primarily where our games sell," he said. "It's a really cool platform, but I have a phone, and it's really hard to compete with that."
"So I'm not sure if it will be successful or not, I hope they are, it's good for the games industry, but we got our tech on it really early. We were, I think, one of the very first people to get one and work with it and we were on stage at the launch, because we have a lot of licensees who are curious about it and so we did the first part. But we can't really fully support that platform unless we're shipping our own games, that's how we know we know that platform, and it's really important for us to do that."
Dear Epic, the Vita has a touchscreen. Show the platform some Infinity Blade II port love. Yours truly.
