作者：Brandon Sheffield

Epic Games首席执行官Tim Sweeney在GDC台北大会上表示：“我们是以Epic游戏起航，作为一家技术公司，我们一直致力于开发主机游戏。”同时Sweeney也承认Ben Cousins（游戏邦注：Ngmoco瑞典工作室总经理，之前在EA DICE、索尼和Lionhead任职）对于未来游戏技术的看法是有道理的。他补充道：“我对行业关于技术方面的共同观点很感兴趣。”

Tim_Sweeney(from pcgameshardware.com)

然而Epic并不是只想创造一些较小的游戏体验。Sweeney说道：“我们也是游戏玩家，所以我们开发的便是自己也想要玩的游戏，也就是一些带有枪和电锯的大型游戏。”

“我们尝试着推动技术去呈现出游戏中任何可行的内容，”而不是让游戏设计去满足技术要求，“我们一直以长远的角度去看待游戏产业。为了能够在今天成功使用游戏引擎，我们需要在三四年前就开始研究这种引擎。”

对于虚幻引擎3，该公司投入了长达4年的时间同时创造《战争机器》和这项技术，并在早期投入大把精力研究新平台功能。Sweeney说道：“现在，也就是在新一代引擎诞生之前我们又回到了相同的循环过程中。虚幻引擎3主要是针对于主机而言，但是虚幻引擎4将面向一个完全不同的目标。”

可行性 vs 实用性

该公司面向于下一代技术所作出的首个努力便是使用虚幻引擎3创建Samaritan样本。在过去，这个样本必须在一台大电脑上运行，并使用三个图像显卡，而在一年后，也就是现在则只需要运行于一张高端的图像显卡。

Sweeney说道：“我们得出的结论是，技术有可能获得戏剧性的发展。有些人会说‘图像质量已经很好了，所以我们现在可以专注于游戏玩法，’但是我们并不会这么想。”他还补充道，他们还需要再接再励。

“同时我们还发现，过去我们需要创建能够让游戏在PC呈现最大运行性能的引擎，并且不得不使用大型美术团队来实现这一点，”他说道，就像《战争机器》团队曾经拥有100名美工人员，其中还包括外包人员。“而我们现在最需要关注的成本元素则是提高这些美工人员的效率。”

该公司希望通过使用虚幻引擎4而“创造出具有震撼力的视觉效果，并且同时也能够提高游戏的性能和效率……但对这些工具的投入得到了回报。如今的美工人员能够更有高效地创造内容。并且从整体来看，我们发现新一代虚拟引擎更能够帮助我们更轻松地在高端和低端设备间过度……我们希望创造出能够从智能手机过度到高端电脑的游戏。我们真心期待在不久的未来能够看到更多移植内容。”

“我们很高兴看到游戏产业的发展，”Sweeney说道，“虽然有时候我们也会担心西方主机市场与PC市场间的隔阂会越来越大。从时间投入与收益产出的比例来看，我们最具盈利性的游戏应该是《无尽之剑》，它甚至超过了《战争机器》。”

这也是为何Sweeney认为免费游戏将推动着未来游戏产业发展的重要原因。他说道：“现在的高端游戏项目主要分布于主机游戏领域。动视每年会在《使命召唤》投入将近1亿美元。”而谁又能负担得起这些投入呢？同时他表示Epic“对智能手机和平板电脑的发展感到非常惊讶。”

Sweeney举例道，iPad 3的性能便将接近于Xbox 360和PS3，并且其发展速度也远远快于摩尔定律。他补充道：“我们希望在今后几年DirectX技术能够广泛应用于这些移动设备上。同时我们也在全球的发展格局中注意到一个有趣的现象。”

PC在线游戏主导着亚洲市场，但美国市场对于PC游戏的定义仅停留在《魔兽世界》的成功，并且PC与主机是两个完全不同的市场。他说道：“从一些普遍功能来看，这些平台正在快速聚合着。而最低端的设备（iPad 2）仍是一部DirectX 9设备！”

Sweeney认为在线游戏发行方式将快速进入主机领域。“我认为美国和欧洲的主机业务将成为一个完全不同的平台，”他说道。我们很快便能够同时在PC和主机上发行免费游戏了！“这一点极具现实可能性。”

这种聚合将给市场带来有趣变化，并且Sweeney还指出了世界上两大第一人称射击游戏，即西方市场的《使命召唤》以及韩国的《穿越火线》（但是在非亚洲市场的名气却不大）。他说道：“我认为在不远的未来这两款游戏肯定会迎来正面竞争。从中可以看出，我们完全有可能创造出一款具有全球吸引力的游戏并将其推向各大市场。”

Sweeney还警告道：“北美和欧洲开发商在运营模式上还远远落后于亚洲。我们创造了许多像《战争机器》之类的游戏，但却需要玩家专门到商店去买DVD，但是这种情况将快速发生转变！”

他表示西方开发者需要学会随着时间的发展而改变，并投入更多精力去了解免费游戏市场。但西方市场也有值得亚洲公司学习的地方，“从商业模式来看，亚洲在线游戏大大领先于西方游戏，但是如果从制作价值来看，还是西方市场略胜一筹，”他说道。

无处不在的虚幻引擎

Epic的新引擎策略是“无处不在的虚幻引擎。”“将这一引擎安装在全世界的各大平台上，”他说道，包括PC在线，带有Flash的网络浏览器，iOS，Android以及主机。但是对他们来说最重要的仍是创造一款可扩展的游戏，也就是不需要为游戏重新建造平台。

免费游戏的发展以及亚洲市场的壮大便是该公司最近与腾讯展开合作的主要原因（游戏邦注：腾讯购买了少数Epic的股权）。过去Epic曾与微软密切合作，但是如今的世界发生了巨大的变化。Sweeney继续说道：“将来你们必定能够看到Epic的关系圈扩展向全世界不同的发行商和不同的平台上。”

“我认为传统的美国人应该只会想要购买一次游戏吧，”他说道，而免费游戏却在不断壮大并侵蚀着全球的零售市场。“我想在不久的将来几乎所有游戏都会选择面向世界市场发行游戏，”“从更长远的角度来看会出现怎样的变化？我们现在所处的时代已开始面临资源有限的情况。而虚拟环境则是无限宽广。这不禁使我好奇未来的某一天虚拟经济是否会超越实体经济而存在。”

Sweeney继续说道：“如今西方开发者仍愿意投入3千万元去开发这些主机游戏，但是我认为在今后5年内，这些公司将会开始进攻亚洲市场。也就是他们将开始开发具有全球性的免费游戏。因为在这里，能够获得幸存的唯一方法便是走向世界。”

最后他总结道：“游戏是最激动人心的产业。在这里我们见证了许多史无前例的变革，也发现了许多非常棒的机遇！”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Epic’s Sweeney: Platform convergence, freemium the inevitable future

by Brandon Sheffield

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, began GDC Taipei’s second keynote with the note that “Being with Epic games, we’re a technology company, and very dedicated to console.” At the same time,

Sweeney also acknowledged that there was a lot of truth to Ben Cousins’ view of the future of game technology. “The fact that we’re starting to converge on a common view on technology is very interesting to me,” he added.

Still, Epic isn’t looking to only make smaller game experiences. “We’re gamers, and we develop the kinds of games we want to play ourselves,” he says, which means “big games with guns and chainsaws.”

“We try to push technology to show what is possible in games,” he says, rather than trying to design games to meet the technology. “We try to take a longer-term view of the game industry.

… To be successful with a game engine today, we have to have started that engine 3 or 4 years ago.”

For Unreal Engine 3, the company spent 4 years building Gears of War and the technology at same time, and put major effort into early adoption of new platform features. “Now we’re in the same cycle, leading up to a new generation of engines,” he said. “Whereas Unreal Engine 3 was developed primarily for consoles, Unreal Engine 4 has a very different set of goals.”

What’s possible, what’s practical?

The company’s first effort toward the next generation was the Samaritan demo, build in UE3. That demo had to run on three graphics cards, in a huge computer — now it’s more practical, a year later, on a single high-end graphics card.

“We came to the conclusion that there’s the possibility for dramatic leaps in technology,” he said. “Some people say, ‘oh, graphics are good enough, and we can focus exclusively on gameplay now.’ We don’t feel that way at all,” he added, saying that there’s a lot further to go.

“We came to the conclusion that in the old days we built engines that would extract the most performance possible out of the PC, and we had to have a large art component to achieve that,” he said. Gears of War had 100 artists working on it, including contractors, for example. “Maximizing the productivity of these artists is now the most important cost factor.”

Thus, with UE4, the company hopes to “Increase the level of visual quality, but also increase the performance and efficiency. … The tools investment is paying off. Artists are able to build content more productively than before. And with the Unreal Engine as a whole, we found it’s much easier to scale down from high end to low end devices than in this generation,” he said. “We expect to be able to build games that can scale from a smartphone to a high end PC. … We expect an unprecedented amount of content portability for the future.”

“We’ve been very happy with the game industry’s growth,” Sweeney said. “For a while we were worried that the divide between the console growth in the west, and the growth of PCs, would increase.” Still, and this is where his opinion begins to converge with Cousins’ keynote yesterday, Sweeney revealed that “The most profitable game we’ve ever made, in terms of man years invested versus revenue, is actually Infinity Blade. It’s more profitable than Gears of War.”

This is why Sweeney believes that future growth will be fueled by free-to-play. “Nowadays the high end of the game business is in these console game,” he says. “Activision invests almost $100 million per year in Call of Duty.” And who can realistically afford to do that? At the same time, he notes that Epic has been “very very surprised to see how fast smartphone and tablet devices are improving.”

Sweeney says, for instance, that the iPad 3 is approaching the performance of the Xbox 360 and PS3 — and the pace of improvement is faster than Moore’s Law. “We expect DirectX technology to be widely available on these mobile devices in the next few years,” he added. “We’re also seeing an interesting thing happen in terms of the overall development pattern globally.”

PC online dominated Asia, but in the U.S. it was mainly just World of Warcraft that was successful for some time, while console was a separate market. “These platforms are rapidly converging, with a set of common capabilities,” he said. “The lowest end device [the iPad 2] is still a DirectX 9 device!”

Sweeney sees online game distribution coming rapidly to console. “I think the console business we see in the United States and Europe will be just another platform,” he says. You should soon be able to ship a freemium game on PC, and on console, simultaneously. “That is a very realistic possibility.”

Convergence is going to change the market interestingly, says Sweeney, as he points out the two biggest FPS in the world are Call of Duty in the west, and Crossfire, made in Korea, but little-known outside Asia. “I think in the future, these two games will be competing head to head,” he says. “It’s possible to build one game that has global appeal and ship it in all markets.”

“North American and European developers are far, far behind the state of the art Asian business models,” he cautions. “We’ve been building these games like Gears of War where you go into the store and you buy a piece of plastic! You just buy this DVD. That is going to change rapidly.”

He says that Western developers need to learn to change with the times, and put a lot of effort into learning about the free to play market. But also the learning will happen the other way, as well. “Asian online games are far ahead of Western games in terms of business model, but the Western games do have a real advantage in terms of production values,” he says.

Unreal everywhere

Epic’s new engine strategy is “Unreal Everywhere.” “Put this one engine on all platforms worldwide,” he says, including PC online, web browsers with Flash, iOS, Android, and console. The most important thing is to build scalable games — the goal is not have to rebuild for platforms.

This interest in free to play and Asia is part of what inspired the company’s recent partnership with Tencent, in which the latter company bought a minority stake in Epic. In the past, Epic had worked very closely with Microsoft, but the world is changing. “You might in the future see the Epic relationship span different publishers and different platforms across the world,” says Sweeney.

“I think like a typical American, in that I just want to buy the game once,” he says. But freemium has grown to eclipse the global retail market. “I agree that this is going to be the way that almost all games will be distributed worldwide,” he says. “Where is this going in the long-term future? We’re at a point in the world’s history where we’re starting to run into resource limitations. … The virtual environment is completely unlimited. It makes me wonder if some day the virtual economy could be greater than the economy for physical goods.”

“All these Western developers spending 30 million to develop these games for dedicated consoles – all of these companies are going to be invading the asian markets within the next five years or so,” he says, “and they’ll be free to play, worldwide, global products. … The only way to survive is to go global.”

“The game industry is the most exciting one on earth,” he concluded. “We’ve seen unprecedented change, just in our lifetimes. It’s an unprecedented amount of change, and also opportunity.” (source:GAMASUTRA)