Epic: Mod competitions are part "species survival"

Epic president Mike Capps has said that competitions for the modding community are in part designed to help the development scene survive and grow in a rapidly changing PC market.

The company specialises in some of the biggest games in the traditional videogame market – Gears of War and Unreal Tournament – and Capps points out that while social and casual games on PC may be booming, developers behind those titles aren't the talent Epic looks to hire.

"Many of our folks were hired right out of the mod community," said Capps, speaking in an interview published today. "Watching the PC games market dip meant that the mod community was dipping as well - it's harder to get people to make a mod for a game when you don't have two million units out there.

"That's scary for us, because that's our next generation of game developers, and it's not likely to be the guys who made a Match-3 game in their basement and tried to throw it up on iPhone," he said. "It's more likely that the people we're going to hire are the ones that made 3D models for characters in a game engine - those are the ones we need for the kind of games we do."

Last week the company handed out over $1 million in its third annual Make Something Unreal Contest. The mod team behind The Haunted also took home an Unreal Engine license and The Haunted: Hell's Reach will soon be released commercially.

"In a way it's a little bit of a species survival for us, for studios like ourselves and Valve - we need that, it's our next generation, and part of the reason for the Unreal development kit," offered Capps.

An extension of that thinking is behind porting a version of the Unreal Engine to the iPhone – it's not a format Epic is likely to make games for, but a demo of PC shooter Unreal Tournament running on the Apple handset shows others that the opportunity is there should teams want to incorporate an iPhone SKU into their plans, said Capps.

"From our perspective there's a tonne of interest in the iPhone, so we did a skunk works tech demo to show that actually our stuff works pretty well on the 3GS, it looks good," he explained.

"It's not a plan for us, we're not diving into iPhone development, but I wanted all our licensees to know that, hey, if they're making a Medal of Honor game and you were going to make an iPhone game anyway, it's not that hard... here are the tricks we did to make that work."

The full interview with Mike Capps, where he also discusses the pros and cons of user-generated content, can be read here.