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So do you predict what Apple might be doing if you’re not getting told? We predict further ahead than they tell us, yes. So you can kind of guess what the life time of the iPad 1-to-iPad 2 transition will be, and look at when their press conferences normally come. We can plan a game based for a certain timeframe and then approach Apple. So we showed them this game as soon as we had something up and running a long time ago and said to Apple: ‘If you have something, this might be really, really good for it.’
So how far can you see the Infinity brand going, because you’re releasing new versions of it every year now Well, this game is very different. I’d say it’s more Diablo style, whereas Infinity Blade originally was – well, you could call it ‘Punch Out with swords’. That was about very neat fights and kind of on rails. Dungeons is more about navigating the areas, exploring and stuff. So it’s within the same IP but it offers a very different experience. We didn’t know what would happen when
we shipped Infinity Blade 2, and then it did better than the first one, which itself is still selling very well. IB2 made us realise that this thing had legs and was a franchise now. So here we are shipping the third one, and we’ll see if everyone’s tired of it. There’s a lot of rich story behind this franchise now – there’s a lot there – so it seemed silly to create a new fancy IP for this game. Why would we do that? Why create another IP and leave a successful one unused? We’ll see. Let’s hope people like it.
Has your synergy with Apple become too lucrative to avoid? Because you’re suddenly on hard deadlines again, where you have to show certain things at certain points, that must be quite demanding. Sure, and I think if we’d kept ChAIR on that rapid release schedule it would have got hard. That’s because there’s a lot of crunching that happens at the end of every game, no matter how much you plan. But Dungeon we
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built with a completely different team that has not as a small team built a game before. They’re all guys who worked on Gears of War. That means that for them it is new and
they’re not at all rueing the iPad launch schedule. Instead they know that it will get their work a lot of attention and get them excited about it.
So you’re moving the IP around dev teams? We do now, and it’s a very nice solution. It seems to be a great way to avoid what’s known as exhaustion.
There’s nothing stopping us making
a $50 million iPad game, except for the fact it would probably be a
little silly. Mike Capps, Epic Games
Proportionally how big is the mobile side of Epic’s business becoming? It’s getting bigger. Obviously it’s tough to beat Gears of War with an iPhone game. Maybe Angry Birds did that; I don’t know. The return on investment is higher for these games than some of the big games now. For these small teams, when they’re successful, as we have been with Infinity Blade, there’s a higher return on man-hours than with the big games. It all feeds into our engine business. Having
excellent games on a range of platforms is how we sell our engine, basically. We show off what you can do. You could be on stage with Apple, for example. You can be an industry leader. In that way, it’s a synergistic business.
From what I hear about PS Vita and 3DS, that’s not the case. It seems that on those platforms you have to make an investment that’s not easy to pair with risk. I would say the same thing for the Infinity Blade games. Those took, say, a 12-man team
six months and a lot of outsourcing and stuff. That can get past a million dollars real quick. That’s not a little development budget to most people. It’s not the mega $70 million Call of Duty-type budget, but it’s big. But for us that’s a lot less risk. And with can take games like that we can be flexible and slot them in to our schedule. It’s hard to ‘sneak in’ a Gears game into a schedule, right? But it’s easy to sneak in an Infinity Blade game. With that we have enough guys at Epic that we can carve it out; we can hire more people and we can make it in the middle of a big console release development or strategy. That’s the nice thing about mobile.
But as mobile devices get so powerful so quickly, does that not make it tougher? It’s similar to what happened seven years ago with console. Mobile is moving really fast. If you think about the new iPad having more memory than the Xbox, which they said at the conference, and than the PS3, then that’s a lot of texturing that you’re going to have to do to fill that up to make the retinal display – which is higher resolution than your TV – look right. That’s a lot of detail. But the good thing right now is that the
expectations aren’t that high, and honestly, the market is not going to support that sixty-dollar game we put a $30 million budget into. That just doesn’t add up right now in this market. So those expectations are a lot lower. But the ability for us to make a game like, for example, Final Fantasy XIII or whatever, on a the new iPad is there. It gives you the space. It gives you a 64GB hard drive, so that’s bigger than a Blu-ray disk. There’s room for the game, and then its got more memory than a PS3 or Xbox, and a high resolution, so there’s nothing stopping us making a $50 million iPad game, except for the fact that it would probably be a little silly.
So that’s too crazy is it? Yes, but for how long? That’s really the question. Just look at the movie industry and how much they spent on Avatar.
APRIL 2012 | 07
At the Apple press event to launch the new iPad during GDC, Epic took to the stage to reveal iOS sequel Infinity Blade: Dungeons
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