No PS3-exclusives from us, says Mark Rein from Epic Games

Epic's Mark Rein confirms that, although the window of opportunity for an exclusive title has long since passed, his team will still support the PS3.

By Eugene Huang

In a GDC interview earlier this month, GamesIndustry.biz spoke with Epic vice president Mark Rein, mostly in regards to his stance on the PlayStation 3. Yet, although Rein has a great deal of praise for the high-end console, he admits that his independent development squad has no current plans to make a platform-exclusive title for it, marking yet another example of how the era of third-party exclusives may be coming to an end.

"I think that bird has flown the coop already on PlayStation 3," he states. "They're not making launch titles any more, and we couldn't just start up a game tomorrow as an exclusive because it takes a few years."

Although Epic is currently working on games for the PS3 (the most publicized of which is Unreal Tournament 3), he doesn't believe that Sony will offer them an exclusive deal any time soon.

"[B]y the time we finished, there would already be hundreds of great games on the platform," he adds. "Gran Turismo, Killzone -- they'll be on the sequels to those games by the time our game would come out, so it's just a timing thing."

The one to beat

Rein, who owns two copies of each of the three next-gen consoles, still believes that Sony is the company to beat. Although the price is high now, he predicts that consumers will flock to the system once it comes down in price by $100-$200.

"Motorstorm has come out, it's a great title," he says. "As the big titles come out, they're going to sell a bunch of machines. When PlayStation Home comes out, they'll sell a bunch of machines."

Rein also admits that he can't understand all of the negative publicity Sony's machine has received so far, but imagines that it's due to their past success as the industry's leader. In particular, he points to recent criticisms over Sony's supply chain:

"So wait," he asks rhetorically, "if they don't have enough machines in stores, that's a bad thing? If they do have enough machines, that's a bad thing? Pick one!"

The gamble

Moving on to the Xbox 360, Rein confesses that the success of their blockbuster title Gears of War was something of a gamble. At the time Microsoft approached them to create a new game for the Xbox 360, both the game and the system's design specs were still in their early prototype phases. Their decision to remain platform-exclusive with the game turned out to be a great chance for both parties.

"It was never pitched 'You'll be our Halo' or anything like that," Rein reminisces, "but we thought, if we could be like a Halo to them, that level of importance -- that more than pays for the fact that it's on one platform. So that was kind of the dream in the beginning. Then 360 came along and it was a really good system, so that was clearly an amazing opportunity for us."

Great, great, a blast

As for the Wii, Rein clarified statements he had made back in 2005, labeling many of the console's games as "gimmicky".

"The comments I said [back then], if you take them in the context I actually said them in, were true. There are certainly going to be lots of games that are gimmicky, but as I said, Nintendo has made some great games for it. Wii Sports is great, Zelda is great, Wii Play is a blast. Those games that people make specifically for that platform, they're always going to be good," he concludes.

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