Epic president Mike Capps has said that the company is using modding competitions like the recent Make Something Unreal Contest to locate new talent and strengthen the PC games market as a whole through the Unreal Engine.
The Make Something Unreal contest challenged modders to create something unique with the Unreal Engine 3. The winner was the team behind The Haunted mod, who took home $50k USD in prize money, plus commercial engine licenses.
"Many of our folks were hired right out of the mod community," said Capps in an interview with GI.biz. "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."
Capps isn't poo-pooing on the iPhone too much though and says that Epic has certainly been interested in the platform - enough to do some Unreal iPhone tech demos anyway -, but says that there are no plans right now for iPhone development.
Instead, a comment from Epic's Mark Rein to Kotaku reveals that the company is focused more on making an Unreal Engine 4 that will function with massively-multiple core systems, which Epic believes will define the future of the PC market.
"Unreal Engine 4 is designed for the day we get massively multi-core processors," Rein said.
Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
The Make Something Unreal contest challenged modders to create something unique with the Unreal Engine 3. The winner was the team behind The Haunted mod, who took home $50k USD in prize money, plus commercial engine licenses.
"Many of our folks were hired right out of the mod community," said Capps in an interview with GI.biz. "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."
Capps isn't poo-pooing on the iPhone too much though and says that Epic has certainly been interested in the platform - enough to do some Unreal iPhone tech demos anyway -, but says that there are no plans right now for iPhone development.
Instead, a comment from Epic's Mark Rein to Kotaku reveals that the company is focused more on making an Unreal Engine 4 that will function with massively-multiple core systems, which Epic believes will define the future of the PC market.
"Unreal Engine 4 is designed for the day we get massively multi-core processors," Rein said.
Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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