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Epic's Rein On Next-Gen And Secondhand
Computer and Video Games has an interview with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games. He expounds on Epic's role in the next generation of consoles, along with his opinions on the industry in general, and the sales of secondhand games. From the article: "Unreal Tournament, the original, is still our biggest-selling game ever. Because we sell our games now in instalments, no single instalment is going to sell in the same way as a single game across multiple formats. We're really recapturing a lot of the original, with less jumping around - it went a little crazy with the double and triple jumps. It'll be toned down and a little more skill-based."
You know, and if you had paid some attention, you would have learned that UE4 is indeed in existence, they have already talked about that. Currently only Tim Sweeney doing stuff with it, but it is obviously being worked on for 2 years. And that with UE3 not yet powering any title on the shelves (that I know of). Weird, but true.
Unreal Tournament was 6GB compressed. Next Generation games are going to be 20GB plus, and how we're going to fit them on DVD9's I don't know, they'll probably be a few of them. On the PS3, we're going to be using the majority of the space on those Blu-ray disks. So, online isn't really the best option in some instances.
Downloading 30Gb isn't really feasible. What online could be, is the back-channel to get additional content. Patches and things like that. I think what Valve has done is great. It'll be interesting to see where marketing fits in. Now they're going with EA in the future, the biggest publisher of all. You can't do one without the other, otherwise no-one knows about your game. Unless you have the huge marketing budgets that major retailers have when launching your game, so I think there's still a very important role for retailers.
That says it right there, doesn't it. MS is going to have a hard time keeping content on discs. People argue whether you need the space between BD-ROM and HD-DVD for video, but I think this is even more important on the video game side. This is one of those things that could become a big problem for MS.
What about Nintendo? For some reason I don't see it as such a big problem (maybe because they aren't focusing on HD this and HD that), but it could still be a problem.
As for the used game comment, I don't blame them. There are many times that I would like to buy a game used and have money go to the publisher to support the people who made the game. The problem is that shops like EB would just take that as an excuse to raise the price higher (used games already cost enough). I buy very few games these days because they just cost too much for the risk. I agree with him that the price of a DVD would be an ideal price ($20-$25), but I don't know how they'd achieve that (except making most games smaller, which in many cases might not be so bad :). There is no good system for this right now, but I think moving to a steam/iTunes like model (where you buy the game online and download it for $15 instead of buying a used copy for $15) makes a lot of sense. That would allow people to play older games, but without paying much, and still have the money go to the publisher. Plus these days it would be feasible to have people download PS type games (one or two CDs) here in the US (let it run overnight). It might be a while before you can do that with current and next-gen games due to bandwidth problems.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.