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Inside View of Epic, Preparing Gears of War 2
Subm writes "Lamborghinis, motion-capture rooms, secret new weapons — these are a few things included in the profile of Epic Games and its Design Director, Cliff Bleszinski. 'A Microsoft employee who works closely with Epic described the company as having a "band dynamic." Staff turnover is low, and many of Epic's most senior employees have been friends for more than a decade. This does not seem a very long time until one sits in on an Epic meeting and realizes that anyone over the age of thirty-five achieves the temporal stature of Methuselah. Epic's recent growth is regarded with wary gratitude by many of its employees, though some miss the old days, when, as Sweeney put it, "we were just a bunch of kids who had some cool ideas and were doing neat things."'"
Then I head over to TPB and see a discussion alongside an ISO for said game, its playable but multiplayer doesn't work. This option is also very easy, inexpensive and only limited by the no multiplayer factor.
So I am sorry to say I am tempted by the latter option, which means sadly that I give the developers no money. Perhaps they should make singleplayer free and charge a small monthly fee for multiplayer?
In conclusion, what he says is very sensible, they make money by selling games, not by having them used for free.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
He's unfortunately right. He wouldn't say that unless there was a strong business case for a PC release not being very profitable to them. The same happens with games not being released simultaneously on Mac and PC. If the Mac release doesn't meet a certain threshold it's a loss and they want to avoid it.
Now, of course someone will reply, "Bu, bu, bu, Blizzard and Valve make scads off PC games." But I -can- play their games on my PC, and my PC is better than most commodity PCs, but not good enough to play Gears, or Crysis. The best I can do is Oblivion I think at 30FPS, maybe.
Wow... guess he doesn't realize that console games can be pirated too. Especially since GoW2 was leaked to the tubes more than two weeks early.
Not at all, he clearly realizes that.
He's saying, essentially, there are pirates on both platforms, but on the PC platform, anyone with a system able to run our game is savvy enough to be a pirate, while anyone who owns an xbox can run our game, and most of them aren't savvy enough to be a pirate.
Note also that he doesn't say that everyone on the PC able to run the game IS a pirate, although clearly thinks that a much higher percent of his potential market on the PC are pirates.
I was pretty miffed at Epic for making comments insulting PC gamers, but I picked up UT3 for the PC anyway because I figured I'd at least I'd try to show that not all PC gamers were 'thieves' as they suggest. It was underwhelming.
The reason PC gamers aren't going wild for Epic's games recently is because Epic stopped caring for PC gamers. The only thing UT3 has going for it is that it's prettier than UT2k4. There's less content, less features, and it's buggier. There's a fantastic mod community for it, but I'd expected much more official extras (like the prequels). There's no word on what's going to happen for patch 1.4 or indeed, if there will be a patch 1.4 (there damn well better be, voice chat still gives me issues over private Hamachi games!). Epic hasn't rereleased a stable demo yet, preferring to just keep offering their garbage "beta demo."
I hate to sound crusty, but Epic had a big hit in the form of Gears of War and all of a sudden decided that PC gamers weren't worth paying attention to. So they shit on us and then complain that we don't buy their games? I'm not going to buy any more Epic products until Epic issues an apology and makes a PC game worth paying for. Anybody who enjoyed UT/UT2003/4 on PC should do the same. I have a 360, but I'm not buying Gears 1 or 2.