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Epic Games is stretching its global production resources to the limit with five game projects and a new engine in development.
The North Carolina group today announced it is "hard at work buiding on Unreal Engine 4", as well as five games that are unrelated to the Gears of War IP.
Speaking today at GDC Europe in Cologne, company president Mike Capps said the PC platform ihas become a renewed target for Epic.
"The PC has for too long been a port-to platform," he said.
It is a near-certainty that some of those new projects will be digital only. Epic has in he past two years delivered blockbuster content for Xbox Live Arcade and, perhaps more importantly, Apple’s iOS devices.
But while a follow up to the iOS game Infinity Blade must surely be in consideration, Capps today said a sequel to the XBLA game Shadow Complex was off the cards.
Epic Games will need the full resources of its subsidiary studios in Poland and Utah to fulfil the remit of building five new projects. Capps’s announcement showed the scale of Epic’s faith in both Warsaw based People Can Fly and Salt Lake City’s Chair Entertainment, the former having built Bulletstorm and the latter producing Infinity Blade and Shadow Complex.
By tradition, games studios have been more eager to build new IP for digital platforms. Triple-A console game development, however, is more hit driven with squeezed profit margins, and thus, tends to require the utilisation of familiar brands.
Recent speculation has linked Epic Games with a new Unreal Tournament project.
In a keynote session entitled Size Doesn’t Matter, Capps said triple-A is in Epic’s DNA.
More importantly, he said, is the level of pride his studio has with the major game projects.
“No one gives a crap about schedules when we’re trying to ship a game to make millions of people happy,” Capps told a packed room in Cologne.
