Epic Games are usually at the forefront developing games for new platforms, but the firm’s not too sure Sony’s latest handheld will do well in a crowded mobile market; and has decided to hold off development until it sees how the portable machine performs in the West.
It was Epic boss Mike Capps who shared the company’s stance with GamesIndustry, adding although PS Vita’s a cool platform, he has a phone, and his phone has lots of games.
“We’re not currently making a Vita game; I’m not sure how well it’s going to be accepted in our Western market which is primarily where our games sell,”Epic Games president Capps told the site.
“It’s a really cool platform, but I have a phone, and it’s really hard to compete with that. So I’m not sure if it will be successful or not, I hope they are, it’s good for the games industry.”
He continued, adding although they are not yet supporting Vita, their technology, Unreal Engine, will be behind many of its games.
“We were, I think, one of the very first people to get one and work with it and we were on stage at the launch, because we have a lot of licensees who are curious about it and so we did the first part.
But we can’t really fully support that platform unless we’re shipping our own games, that’s how we know we know that platform, and it’s really important for us to do that. And so with Vita we’re not planning on shipping a game and so that means we’re pretty honest with folks and say ‘you can have the Vita code we’ve got but this is not the same as us having shipped on Xbox or iPhone.’ It’s the same business decision I think that anybody makes, is this a platform for me?”
Capps doesn’t feel the need to be on every platform either, especially at launch, when install base is small.
“But that’s very different from saying we’re going to do a launch title, which would be huge support, but costly in terms of poor install base on the platform,” he went on.
“The first year is always bad, it’s always hard, and so we just prefer to wait. And with Xbox we shipped a year after it came out and had a better install base.”