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Wii Market Not 'Worthwhile' for Epic Games

Posted July 23, 2009 by James Brightman

Rein continued by noting that some of these Wii games are “good cautionary tales” in terms of what the publishers attempted to do and how the market received the titles. “There are some good publishers out there that make some great triple-A games that make hundreds of millions of dollars, and I'm not going to name them, but then at the end of the year when they look at earnings, they lose money! Or they make only tens of millions of profit on billions in revenue. It just shows you what happens when you think, 'Oh great, they're diversifying, they're stretching outside their comfort zone,' and now they're making less money,” he said.  

Ultimately, for Epic Games, Rein said its low-end platform is Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. Epic's Chair Entertainment is currently preparing to release Shadow Complex for XBLA next month, and Unreal Engine has been used to power a number of XBLA games in the past. 

“We do the PC extremely well, and we do the 360 and PS3 extremely well, so to me there's still more gold to be mined on those platforms than starting a new mine [with Wii or other platforms]. Starting a new mine is ridiculously expensive... It takes a while to get on new platforms, get it right and get it moving. If you keep turning your focus to other things, it takes you a long time to get there. So we see the three platforms – 360, PS3, PC – as still the large opportunities. And the truth is, those platforms is where the business is; for third parties that's where the money is,” he remarked. 

With seemingly every big game on the market relying on Unreal Engine these days, Epic Games is clearly in great shape, and it would explain the huge grin on Mark Rein's face every time we meet with him (or maybe he just likes us?). We asked Rein about Epic's future expansion plans. The company over the past couple years acquired both People Can Fly and Chair Entertainment – should we expect further strategic acquisitions?

“Not really,” Rein answered, “Both Chair and People Can Fly were acquisitions of people we were already partnered with. PCF worked on Gears of War PC with us, we knew them very well, knew their talent level and what they could do. And for Chair, we were pretty close with them because the two principals of that company had worked with our prior engine and we were friends. We loved what they did with Undertow, and we love the idea of these shorter form games that can still be very high quality. If there's an indication of what you can do with Unreal Engine 3 for under a million dollars, it's these guys. And now, I'm actually getting a few guys to work up some projects for under $50k, to make some interesting puzzle games and show what our engine can do there too. So I don't think we'll be buying anybody, but these were very strategic. It was never our intention to say 'Let's go grow the studio by buying people.' We grow by hiring really talented people. That's our primary method.” 

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.