| d21lewis said:Patcher said it, so two things automatically happen: An angel kills himself and my bullshit detector goes off. However, if any company goes multi-plat (or wants to go multi), I can't blame them. Games cost too much. It's especially difficult nowadays for a developer to depend on one console for their bread and butter. It's a new world we live in. I prefer exclusives but companies need to thrive. |
In terms of financials, it really depends. Exclusivity offers a big hype factor for games especially when there is so much software overlap between the HD twins. There's no real proof that Gears of War would have sold better as a multi-plat. Would Gears of War have had the same hype behind it without the Microsoft hype machine, the attention that comes from being a high-profile Xbox 360 exclusive and Microsoft's #2? I doubt it. Call of Duty has really hit it out of the park but there's no guarantee that Epic could could have found the right publisher to give them Call of Duty-esque market penetration. At the end of the day, Epic I'm assuming is a profitable company, very successful and their profile has gone way up since making a deal with Microsoft. So the deal with Microsoft has been positive and mutually beneficial to both parties.
Epic probably will experiment with the multi-plat market with other IPs (like they did with unreal tournament 3) and there's no reason why they shouldn't. It's not like Epic is going to be forgotten anytime soon so why not? Epic is a developer, its the publishers that take on the financial risk when titles are developed and released (for developers, the risk is more related to reputation than anything. If you have a reputation for developing games that make money, you are guaranteed to get work from publishers. If you have a reputation for making games that lose money, well, that's when you are in trouble). Epic is already a proven top-selling AAA blockbuster developer so if they branch out to multi-plat releases and that doesn't work out, their reputation will still be intact. But they should keep Gears of War exclusive. Microsoft is a really helpful sugar daddy and they don't wanna rock the boat with a great software publisher like that. Don't fix what isn't broken.
