Candid interview wrt the business side of Epic (w/Mike Capps)

[Carl B]

There was an interview conducted at D.I.C.E. recently in Wired with Mike Capps of Epic, which struck me if nothing else by its candor. And that's not to say in a good way either depending, but very upfront nonetheless. The theme of the interview was the business side of Epic's business; basically making sure that developers work within constraints, marketing their games, and other odds and ends.

The interview should be checked out here: http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/02/las-vegas----be.html#more

...but I'll post below some of the quotes I was surprised to be reading.



Surprising because it admits to the whole European 'conspiracy' we often complain/theorize about:

For example. How do you decide print versus online, and which print do you go with or which online do you go with?

I hate to say it's so mercenary as who's got the most circulation, but that's a big factor. We almost always start in the U.S., I don't think we've ever gone with Europe, mostly because all the European press, I'm surprised they haven't changed this, but they're willing to take a European exclusive. They'll give you a cover for a European exclusive which is the same date as we put in a U.S. magazine, which is great. But nowadays, the profits we're making off a copy of Unreal Tournament sold in England, it's selling for fifty pounds, versus $50, and the cost of goods are the same, so it's three times as profitable, maybe? So you think we'd be focusing more on that market, but we aren't.

Surprising because it shows a strong self-awareness/unabashedness as to Epic's market clout:

We've recently seen the rise of gaming blogs and there's a big move from print to online. Does that ever factor into these kind of decisions?

The thing is, they'll all pick it up and you don't need to give them an exclusive. As strange as this is, the only reason we would do something exclusive with like a GameSpot or something like that is because they'll give you front billing for three or four days which really means a lot. That's a huge coverage, just in terms of eyeballs for hardcore gamers. So we'll often give them, like, an exclusive look at the weapons, or something like that, and be out there on the front of GameSpy, IGN, you name it. Large sites. But if we were to announce a product in Times Square, and have a big surprise, you know, Locusts come from underneath the ground, that's what I'd like to do, that'd be fun.

Every game wire's gonna pick it up anyway, so we don't need to call Kotaku beforehand, because they're gonna cover it, they're gonna slap it all over the page if it's news already. I guess the hard part is for people who are announcing a title that isn't news, and I don't know how to do that.

Not surprising per se, but very much in the continuing vein of extremely candid:

True. So why does everything have to be some kind of shooter?

Why does everything have to be an action movie? You know? Come on, because they sell. That's a big part of it. We've looked at a lot of different IP ideas, and as much as I'd like to make an edgy horror game, you're niching yourself really badly with that. You might break out and hit Silent Hill numbers, but that would be a disaster for us. Instead of making something like a Gears sequel, which we think could do quite well, doing a game that's a big niche, like a Longest Journey style adventure game. Now I came out of Zork, I'm a text guy, I'd kind of like to do a text game. Or like a Loom game, half graphics, half text. But I'm not going to do that because I have a lot of mouths to feed at Epic. So that's part of it.

The other thing is that we make games that we want to make, and that happens a fair amount. RPGs get made because there are RPG weenies who love that stuff, which I am, too. We're shooter weenies at Epic, it's what we like doing. If I put Barbie in front of them and said, "But we're getting tons of money," I'd have people quitting. If I get a platformer, I'd have people quitting. It's just not dark enough, it's not badass enough. So we have to make games that will keep our guys happy and excited, because that passion is what makes our games cool. Because otherwise why bother?

Surprising because of a direct swipe at a competing game:

Now you've got the Gears franchise and the Unreal franchise, would you consider doing another third-person shooter, or would that dilute your brand too much?

There's a small minority who think that Gears and Unreal are too close and too similar. But it would be a little tougher if we'd made Drake's Fortune — it's Gears outside. It starts getting a little closer. So, I don't know if we would, that's a good question. Haven't thought about it much.

The whole interview truly is worth reading, if only to understand the mindset of one of Epic's less public top people. It's really a level of upfrontness I'm not used to reading in an interview given a very PR-conscious industry; again it's not even candid in a good way per se, but it is very informative within its scope.

Mike Capps was also the Epic representative arguing pro-engine licensure at D.I.C.E. for those who have not seen that thread yet (located here.)

 

[Carl B]

This one as well, which gives a lot of insight into the power and appeal achievements can have for the developers themselves beyond making the game more appealing to consumers:

What are your thoughts on Achievements?

...Tell you what I love, it's data mining. I know exactly how many people have played the third chapter of Gears of War, in co-op, as Dom, and have completed it in each difficulty level because I can count Achievements online. It's wonderful for us.

So I know -- I'm gonna make up the number because I'm probably not supposed to give away the number -- but say it's 10 million people who've played all the way through Gears 1, compared to the four and a half that we sold. And that's because of rentals, used, people sharing it with their friends. And that's just the online numbers, so if you take those 10 million, and you expand it out, that means 15 million people have played it all the way through and weren't online because they don't have Live. It's just sick. It's so great for data mining. I know exactly how many people have played ten rounds of each multiplayer game types, I know what game types are popular. Not just with stats, but also with Achievements...

 

[Rangers]

I'm wondering when exactly we'll get UT3 on 360. I'm assuming it's six month timed? Is there ever a timed exclusive of less than 6 months?

If it's 6 months, by my calculations they couldn't release it any earlier then Jun 11. And I assume there's some advertising ban in that too, so assuming they want to market it for a couple months first, we wouldn't see it on 360 until July or August?

[Final remark moved to new thread]

 

[Mike Acton]

I thought the interview was good and Mike Capps had some nice, straightforward answers to share. He's a good speaker too - his presentation at DICE on the "Build vs. Buy" question was pretty polished (In retrospect, I wish I had used slides too!) - and he stayed both professional and friendly about the whole thing, which I appreciate. I also saw him speak at GDC at the UT3 postmortem, where I thought he was pretty candid about the issues they had (specifically with the things they weren't prepared well enough to do, and what lessons they took from that).

On this subject of this interview, I thought this was interesting:

And it's a purposeful tension, because Cliff wants more, badder, cooler, stuff, and Rod says, this is all you can have and if you want cake, you're going to have to not eat pizza for dinner. And that tension is really important, and if you get into the "design is law," you lose your tension and then God knows what you end up with or how long it takes to get there.

It's something I can completely agree with. You need that tension - you need to be able to go back and forth between tech, art, design and business/marketing in order to negotiate something that's going to be able to work. Strong leadership in each group helps provide those checks and balances by challenging each other to do better without doing something that's broken from the start. (So that you don't need to keep completely starting over a bunch of times, as Mike pointed out.)