Mark Rein: Business Strategist
Thanks to reader JP for not ignoring articles about Mark Rein like the rest of us.
Mark Rein is the vice president of Epic Games. His job is to get people to license the Unreal Engine. He goes about this by visiting conferences and sounding so out of touch that people will think the Unreal Engine must be really good to keep Epic in business with Mark on the team.
His latest trip was to England, where he kicked things off by announcing that “very little of [the episodic business model] makes any actual sense.”
He apparently didn’t elaborate on which parts of it do make sense— Metafuture guesses one part might be the statistics for Half-Life 2: Episode One, which show the game has been launched close to 1.5 million times so far.
Mark also told his audience that he hates Intel— their graphics chips are what’s really killing the PC gaming market. The second part about the PC games market getting killed, I can confirm that’s definitely true— I was at PC-only game developer Ensemble Studios on Monday and, well, the queso dip for their catered chicken and steak fajita lunch was frankly overspiced. And plastic forks and knives! I really needed to slap Bruce Shelley down, but I felt a little sorry for this captain of a sinking ship. Plus, one of his over a hundred employees probably would have taken me down eventually— probably somewhere between the studio’s private elevator and the elevators that could take me to the first floor of the building.
Getting back to the problem with Intel: according to Mark, it’s that they’re selling these wonderless graphics chips for $5 cheaper than a gaming chip would cost the hardware manufacturers. Mark can’t understand why companies would want to save a lousy five dollars on each the millions of computers they sell instead of supporting the games industry. I’m pretty sure this means he would also be completely OK with just giving Metafuture a mere ten cents for each copy of Gears of War that sells, because that’s just a lousy ten cents. You can just send a PDF of that contract via email, Mark.
July 13th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Rein suffers from Scott Miller pundit syndrome. He assumes that the conventional wisdom in his corner of the market is the conventional wisdom for people making handheld games, adventure games, puzzle games and so on, and doesn’t understand why anyone would bother making something besides generic tech-driven blockbusters (or not making, in Scott’s case).
Highlight:
July 17th, 2006 at 11:53 am
I think that’s 100% true. The guys producing big budget first person shooters usually don’t understand the rest of the market. They’re caught up in the cult of personality that their success creates and can’t see beyond it to a wider world.
On the other hand, I think you’ve got to do better than eight months to a year between episodes to make Episodic content even remotely viable.
There have been games made this way before too. EA’s attempt with the Wing Commander series and El Dorado Gate for Dreamcast, released only in Japan by Capcom, come to mind.