Speaking to Edge this month, Epic president Mike Capps opens up about piracy, and why “the money’s on console”. In a frank and open interview on Unreal 4, Gears of War and Bulletstorm, Capps claims that “piracy’s already had its impact”.

“If you walked into [Epic's Offices] six years ago,” said Capps, “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?” he says, “It’s because the money’s on console.”

“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.” Capps discusses the rise of free-to-play microtransaction based games, like Farmville, the “biggest game of all right now.”

“So, maybe Facebook will save PC gaming,” he concludes, “but it’s not going to look like Gears of War.”

http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2010/05/16/epic-president-the-moneys-on-console/

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It looks like a lot of developers are leaving the PC, because they can't make money with it.

Well, obviously.

A lot of people don't have high end gaming PC's on top of the piracy problem. And for a console all you need to do is buy and hook up, you don't have to have powerful enough graphics cards, enough RAM, etc.

Considering Piracy is really getting big on the Wii and the 360...

I think they should go PS3 exclusive.

Also, for the lol's.

Maybe Capps would also like to mention that the PC version of Gears of War was a buggy piece of $*, and the DRM got so bad that there was a 10 day period in which legitimate players couldn't even play the game, leaving the pirates the only people who could. Piracy is the PC gaming industry equivalent of Communism: Any unpopular actions you take, you can (attempt to) rationalize it by playing the piracy card. If only they'd redirect their efforts spent locking down games and actually used that time to make the games better!

Didn't it also require buying live for co-op or multiplayer? 

UT3 wasn't exactly a bad effort, but it seems the community preffered to keep playing 2004 instead, I guess the lack of assault modes was a big factor.  So I wouldn't really say piracy was an issue there, they simply didn't make a product that UT fans felt was worth buying.

I wouldn't bet anymore on FarmVille, I was addicted, now I almost stopped playing it, as it's become so slow it feels like swimming in molasses...
As usual, be it minigames or bigger ones, what will get PC games out of crises will be emerging developers, besides the big ones that found a business model less vulnerable to PC market drawbacks.
Not taking account of the sheer size of PC user base, that makes PC gaming huge even considering a small percentage of legit gamers.
Anyway, Epic shouldn't worry about PC, the space they'll free will find lots of developers eager to fill it.

If you still focus on PC, you can get plenty out of PC. Just look at the success of Crysis, a game that won't even run on 95% of PCs.

Epic are probably just pissy UT3 flopped, but that has little to do the state of PC gaming.

They love PC gaming soo much they left port of GoW1 to People Can Fly :)

I think this si funny because wasnt there a thread the other day about used games being worse for business than piracy, or was that for consoles only?

And yet you speculated and brought it up anyway. It's the same crap going on in the BioWare thread. Namely, let's bring up a red herring that has nothing to do with the issue so we can make a post and not have to bring a legitimate argument to the table.