I figured i'd repost this seeing as the original poster got immediately banned for ban-dodging...
From N4G:
It would seem that Developer/Publisher relations between Epic and Microsoft Game Studios is at an all time low and even spilling out into the public. In short, Epic has had to break every rule they've laid down for themselves and their reputation with the PC gaming community in the name of Microsoft profiteering... and they know it!
Cliff Bleszinski of Epic has even been quoted as threatening Microsoft to port over GeOW to the PS3 to try to leverage some developer rights over the content of the game and XBox Live, but they have already inked the contract and Microsoft is winning much to the chagrin of Epic.
While this doesn't seem likely seeing as MS owns the rights to the first two Gears titles, this just shows how Epic truly cares about the gamers. They wanted the Gears map pack to be free, and not cost $10 like MS made them charge for it. They're standing up to MS and their bull*** micro-transactions. I've read in other articles that they think that games should actually be getting cheaper, like down to the DVD level, so that the gaming market would grow substantially and everyone would benefit.
I love Epic! :oops:
UT ftw!
*****Edited for more stuff*****
Here's the article where Mark Rein of Epic says games should be priced around the level of DVDs...
Here's the exact quote:
A very smart man, Dave Jones, told me the other day that ultimately, games need to be the same price as DVDs. If we could sell these kind of quantities, that would be do-able. I mean, I don't know if we can get down to DVD prices anytime soon, that's going to take exponential growth to the size of our marketplace, if we could get a percentage of the resale revenue. I don't mean a guy selling on Ebay, I mean the stores. Mark Rein
And then another one from the same article:
I hate to hear people talk about "We're going to charge more because it costs more". Sure, it costs more because you're developing using better technology and making better games. Not just because you're wasting money developing your own tools - there's a lot of people that are doing that.
You could consider me a little disingenuous on this because I've got technology to sell to people, but there's other technology you can buy, not just ours. People who are trying to re-invent the wheel are spending way more money than they should. Our own games, we're seeing a 30-50% increase in cost, but we're expanding our teams and make much better games.
UT 2007 is way more detailed than any UT games we've done prior to this title. It's not processed three times, and it's not costing us 30 million USD. There's no excuse for us to raise the price. I hope retail and rental dovetail into that and hopefully reduce the people playing our games that aren't paying us. When we worked with Atari, they sold our games for $39 and we actually agree with that policy. Reduce the price of our game, not increase it.
It's a little more difficult to do that on consoles because you're paying royalties to the manufacturers, but you're paying royalties to subsidise the machine and marketing. If we were able to share with them the money they make from rentals and retail, that could help lower the price. I hate hearing people want to raise the price. If you can't afford it, you shouldn't have it. My point is that if we can make it more affordable, we can grow the market. One of the ways we can do that is to use Unreal Engine 3 and take advantage of the productivity gains you can take from that. Mark Rein
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