For his part, Capps guesses that’s about “four or five years away, I think”. Right now, Epic is focused on developing Unreal Engine 4, which has been in development for the past seven years in anticipation of the next console gen.

“We’re very concerned that the next generation will be massively parallel and most engines won’t be able to adapt for that,” Capps said.

Gears of War 3 on Next Gen Consoles? [VE3D]

Capps said that the Tokyo office would focus “mostly [on] technical support and sales support”, with Epic Games having an “expectation of much closer relationships with Japanese studios”. But, after praising the Japanese development community as one of the strongest in the world, he said “we may have secret plans to hire some Japanese game developers too”.

“I’ve talked to some developers who are saying ‘If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay $US20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free’. We don’t make any money when someone rents it, and we don’t make any money when someone buys it used – way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it.”

That would reduce everything but a retail sale to a demo, in my view. This doesn’t sound like Capps specifically advocating such a bastard-arse move. But these two sides — developers and retailer/resellers — need to arrive at some sort of truce or else the only ones who’ll get screwed are the gamers.

I can’t imagine the Amazon and Metacritic reviews for such a game. It would make the Spore DRM backlash look like a polite disagreement. Seriously, games industry, you want to start spewing douchewater like the RIAA, go for it. They can tell you what it’s done for their sales.

Capps: We Really Need to Make Strides Against the Secondhand Market [Videogaming247, via Bingegamer]

Clearly, Mr. Capps has never experienced the thrill of reading headlines while folding proteins in Life With PlayStation! And those Mii parades? Painfully hip.

Capps tempers his enthusiasm for Microsoft’s cool factor when it comes to promoting Xbox Live Arcade games. On the subject of his company’s recently acquired Chair Entertainment, Capps notes “there’s no marketing path, there’s no PR path for a really sharp 20 dollar Live Arcade game,” something that lead to Undertow for XBLA being financially unsuccessful.

Not sure there’s any easy solution to the marketing of online titles, whether they be on Live, PlayStation Network or WiiWare. I’m certainly not looking forward to the future of more invasive DLC marketing, as I fully expect pop-up ads to start invading my regular game playing at some point.

Certainly an Undertow demo attached to a copy of Gears of War 2 wouldn’t hurt…

Epic: Microsoft is “winning” online battle [GamesIndustry.biz]

“Because what we did was take a great game, Gears of War 1 for Xbox 360, made it run at higher resolutions and added three new hours of really good gameplay and it got lower reviews. I think that’s bullshit, and I don’t understand it. I can’t figure out what it is”.

Voodoo Extreme, in the post and the comments, puts forth a fine explanation: 1) The game had bugs at the outset that needed patches. 2) Multiplayer matchmaking via Windows Live was terrible, should be better now that they’ve done away with the gold/silver distinction.

But bottom line, as one commenter points out ,it’s probably the fact that it’s not a simultaneous release with the 360 title, not even close. Because when reviewers go checking out a port, if the new-and-better isn’t slap-you-in-the-face obvious, they’re probably going to spot what doesn’t work and harp on it.

It does make me wonder what kind of reviews we’ll see for Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC.

Lower Review Scores for Gears PC is “Bullshit,” Says Capps [Videogaming247, via Voodoo Extreme]

Develop reports that Capps also expressed plans to utilise the recently purchased Chair Entertainment to increase its stable of intellectual property. “We want to learn from casual games”, he’s quoted as saying, telling casual game developers on hand “we’re really jealous of the things you do and we’re going to steal all your ideas.”

He then chainsawed them all in half and took their brains back to Epic Games science labs for further study.

Epic Games looks to comic books for building new IP [Develop]

Said Capps:

“We’ve got Unreal [Engine] 4 in production right now… it’s going to be in the next console generation – our rough guess is 2012 [to] 2018″.

Tim Sweeney also has a guess about what the platforms will be at that time, and in what order Epic will address them:

“Version 4 will exclusively target the next console generation, Microsoft’s successor for the Xbox 360, Sony’s successor for the Playstation 3 – and if Nintendo ships a machine with similar hardware specs, then that also. PCs will follow after that”.

Epic’s Capps: Unreal Engine 4 Due For ‘Next Console Generation’ [Gamasutra]

The reason [it] exists is because our characters are so bloody expensive to draw..

Meaning that they have more detail close-up than say Halo characters. Fair enough! Though we prefer “looks cool.” Elsewhere Capps says the sequel have battles that feel more massive in scale. Hope he doesn’t have another dry explanation for that.
Gears of War 2 Details [GameSpy via videogaming247]

I’m not gonna poke the snake of what-is and what-ain’t next-gen. Let Capps do that for himself:

It’s a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they’re like, “Oh my God that’s so cool, I’m gonna go buy it.” So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they’ve showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. Obviously there’s a class of people who really love it and enjoy it and are getting into the games but I’m still waiting for that one game that makes me play it.

Now, granted, the Wii comes in for cutesy-poo abuse from hardcore gamers as the day is long. And from the tone of the titles and the console, it’s hard to imagine Gears of War sequel using the Wiimote (I own neither, just assuming). But it’s not like Wii titles put up marginal sales figures. That doesn’t mean every developer has to start building a title, pronto. But neither does it mandate a developer totally shut the door on the industry’s top-selling console if he’s not. Just sayin’.

IGN has the entire interview, if you’re inclined. Megatonik sifted out the good parts and posted on it, too.

NYCC ‘08: Talking Gears 2 and So Much More [IGN, thanks Megatonik]

I was going to cut multiplayer from Gears because I thought it wasn’t coming together fast enough…The day before E3 I’m like “no guys, it’s not pulling together”. And they made it, they pulled it together, and then we won every award.

But maybe Gears multiplayer is only good because he almost cut it. Oohh, deep, we know. But Capps had another opinion that was just plain wrong.

So, you know I thought the Mad World music, for the commercial that’s won so many awards, I thought it was stupid; I was like “what are you thinking? Nobody knows Donnie Darko any more.

No, now people just know Mad World as the song from the awesome Gears of War trailer.

But apparently it’s a good thing nobody actually listens to this guy.

Mike Capps, Epic Games president, says he was going to cut multiplayer from Gears of War [pro-g]