14 DAY TRIAL // For quite a long time, developers have said that the heart of videogaming is moving away from the good old PC because of the huge impact of piracy. One of the big developers who are now initially working for gaming consoles and then port to the PC are shooter stalwarts Epic Games, and they are also saying piracy is driving them away from their first love.
Mike Capps, the president of Epic Games, talked to gaming magazine Edge and said “If you walked into six years ago, Epic was a PC company. We did one PS2 launch title, and everything else was PC. And now, people are saying ‘Why do you hate the PC? You're a console-only company'. And guess what? It's because the money's on console.” There's no arguing with Capps up until this point. Any title that can target the pretty large console install base in addition to the PC gamers will likely move more copies and so earn more dollars for those who made it.
The Epic executive then went on to specifically mention the main plague of PC gaming, saying “We still do PC, we still love the PC, but we already saw the impact of piracy: it killed a lot of great independent developers and completely changed our business model” before adding “So, maybe Facebook will save PC gaming, but it's not going to look like Gears of War.” All fans who were expected a free-to-play Gears of War on the popular social network should abandon hope.
At the moment, the people at Epic Games are working on Gears of War 3, which is set to arrive exclusively on the Xbox 360 from Microsoft in April 2011. The game will likely conclude the series and will see Marcus Fenix take on the mutated Lambent. Though subsidiary People Can Fly the studio is also engaged in the development of another shooter called, rather self explanatory, Bulletstorm.