Inside View of Epic, Preparing Gears of War 2 106
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."'"
CliffyB, man, it's CliffyB (Score:2, Insightful)
He has not earned the right to be called Cliff or Clifford. He has to own up to hundreds of stupid comments yet.
Like, you know, "all PC gamers are thiefs". Which version of GoW2 was leaked, genius?. 360, you say?. In your face, bitch.
It's a pity the New Yorker is losing valuable time with this idiot.
PS.- GoW is an average game, although I admire the big amount of bugs you were able to put into the PC version. Congrats.
sounds reasonable to me (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:CliffyB is a jackass (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:!overrated? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sounds reasonable to me (Score:2, Insightful)
It wasn't $49.99 at release. Who's the liar now? People like you who are quick to accuse, insult, and point fingers when they feel their sacred cows are being threatened are the reason 'fanboy' has become an epithet to most.
Re:sounds reasonable to me (Score:2, Insightful)
At the time of this post: 49.99 USD = 82.6223 AUD
Perhaps he's not american?
Re:CliffyB, man, it's CliffyB (Score:3, Insightful)
He has not earned the right to be called Cliff or Clifford. He has to own up to hundreds of stupid comments yet.
Looks like one thief is a little upset about being called a thief!
(I joke, calm down)
Serious point: who hasn't said stupid things? Find me one person who has never put their foot in their mouth and I'll show you someone who doesn't have a mouth (or maybe a foot, but that strains the metaphor.) I've said dumb stuff today. Fortunately for me, there were no reporters present and no one really cared enough to blog about it. Saying all PC gamers are thieves sounds like something that's been taken far out of context. The guy makes games for PC, right? As I understand that, the PC games market is on the endangered species list. Maybe some of that is because PC gamers tend to throw temper tantrums every time something is not quite up to their liking? Like if one developer one time says something that could be taken out of context as disparaging to PC gamers, at least some of them make voodoo dolls of that developer?
It takes a special brand of bravery to subject yourself to abuse at the keyboards of gamers by making any game, but you're opening yourself up to a whole new world of flaming by making a PC game that isn't absolutely perfect. I'm not sure why anyone is suprised when games don't come out for the PC with crap like this.
Re:CliffyB, man, it's CliffyB (Score:3, Insightful)
Your point is moot, a pirated copy will work on any powerful enough PC without extra expense or serious drawbacks while modding the xbox to play pirate games costs a fair bit, voids the warranty and removes accessibility to Xbox live. Not to mention the added hassle of getting the correct version to burn for each region. I think I can see which one I'd rather pirate on.
And you think that a PC with the horsepower to run Gears at Xbox 360 quality comes cheap? You can now pick up the baseline 360 for $200. You'd probably spend twice that on just your graphics card to run Gears PC at 720p.
Yes, you can download and play the games more easily on a PC than on a 360, but I've seen the high-end graphics card from a generation after mine called ancient recently, and my card (a 7900GT) is only a couple years old. For the cost of updating my graphics card to something that would run FC2, Crysis, and other recent games at good quality (I can just barely run Crysis at mostly-playable framerates at 1680x1050 at lowest everything else which is pretty fugly, FC2 is even worse at 1100x700 or something in that vague range with all settings low-medium, and 360 ports are almost always far slower than they should be), I could get a spare 360 and whatever hardware I'd need to play pirated games, and a hefty stack of dual layer discs.
Re:CliffyB is a jackass (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
my 2c (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fuck Epic (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:CliffyB is a jackass (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I would have to wonder where CliffyB would be today if it wasn't for all the dedicated *PC* Epic fans like myself playing his maps for hundreds (okay more likely thousands) of hours in the original Unreal Tournament. If it wasn't for all of the PC gamers playing UT, including the vast number of players who pirated the game thus making it as popular as it was (including myself, I was young and poor when it was released, I purchased a copy later.. and UT2k3 and UT2k4), would CliffyB be working for Epic now?
Would Epic themselves be as well off as they are now if not for the popularity of UT (pirate copied players and all)?
Original CliffyB maps from when he was just a mapper and had no direct affiliation with Epic, I haven't played UT in years but I know these maps like the back of my hand:
DM-Barricade, DM-Codex, DM-Curse][, DM-Mojo][, DM-Shrapnel][, DM-Tempest and DM-Turbine.
As a core Epic fan for a very long time, I guess I find it a little offensive that I am no longer even considered a potential customer because I *might* pirate their games, not that anything Epic have released to PC in recent times has interested me.
I can understand console games are more profitable and that's where their focus is now, but perhaps as an Epic employee CliffyB should be more careful with his words rather then alienating all the gamers who likely played a role in helping CliffyB/Epic get where they are today.
Also I don't understand the logic behind simply not releasing a game to a platform due to pirates, Epic spent many years making PC games, is it really so expensive for them to create and sell PC ports that they lose money due to the number of pirates? How many sales would it take to cover costs and turn a profit? Instead they chose to snub their original fan base?
Re:CliffyB is a jackass (Score:2, Insightful)
He wouldn't say that unless there was a strong business case for a PC release not being very profitable to them.
How much would it really cost to port from the 360 to PC - it's nearly the same platform.
When you compare no PC games sales to any sales at all - for a game you have already developed - I would think you can make a pretty strong business case to release, piracy or no.
It feels more like spite than sound business practice to me.