Epic Responsibility
Epic's Mike Gamble on the challenges of looking after licensees and sticking to your strengths
There's certainly an interest from licensees about what they can do and how they could do it. I think it's pretty cool. It's done the usual Nintendo quirky market thing.
It's clearly working. It's an alternative isn't it? It's another thing to look at, another way of delivering content which will work for some people and not for others. I quite like the idea, it's got some interesting applications outside of games as well, and interesting ways of getting Samaritan content for instance, without having to have that hardware. There's issues of game play in terms of lag, etcetera.
It it the Gaikai model or is it the OnLive model? Clearly the technology is right on that threshold of being viable and working, there are people using it. And that can only get better.
Yes and no. You look at the console franchises and yes, clearly. And then you look at stuff on the iPad and it's clearly not that big an issue, you're getting some engaging single player experiences on this, because that's how people use it.
Clearly a console product or a PC product now almost has to have multiplayer otherwise it's just not considered to be a complete product. In fact it's almost gone the other way where the single player element of it is actually the throwaway and it's the multiplayer which is the critical element.
At the end of the day we're a games and technology developer, so to go into the games industry would be kind of foolish, because we don't know anything about it. Why should we succeed there? That's kind of arrogant to assume if you're very good at this and it's kind of similar to that then you must be good at that.
From a licensing perspective what worries us, if you like, is the distraction of something like that. If we were to engage with any one film company to kind of win that license as it were, it could end up in a very very long process and generally get messy. So we tend to be a little bit hands off. And Jay Wilbur really is the one guy that will look at those opportunities and talk to them seriously. The rest of them, we don't want to get pulled into that mire just yet because we don't know anything about the industry. We don't know how they operate, we don't know what their usual financial terms are and we could end up wasting time, money and spinning our wheels there, where as we know we can concentrate on what we do and we do really well, and there's a massive market still untapped for what we do already.
It's really easy to be distracted by shiny baubles, whether that be pre-vis on films, doing stuff for car manufacturers, whatever it happens to be. In the end you can end up chasing these things and your core business is then neglected.
Yes. I think it's very tempting. And I think it's actually to Epic's credit that they keep the company doing what we do, and really focused on what we do. And that's a very difficult thing for a company to do.