NEWS - Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Gears Cost Just $9 Million
In an interview with Wired he said, “We spent less than $10 million to make Gears of War. People are always saying that making next-generation games is really expensive, and we're saying, you should license our technology." Rein, never one to pass up an opportunity to promote Epic’s successful engine, added that persuading companies that Unreal Engine 3 is more than just about shooters is one of the challenges of his job “Imagination is the biggest barrier,” he said. “When I get asked, can you do this kind of game, that kind of game. Yeah, you can do all kinds of games. You just have to use your imagination. So we're really good at helping our licensees figure out how to attack problems and do things that we're not even doing in our own games. The company says Japan is its big ambition right now. “It's definitely a challenge to convince Japanese developers to work with a third-party technology like ours. But we've got a few, and we're gonna have more. I think Square Enix, they're the granddaddy. I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll get more. We've been looking to hire somebody in Japan, to be our representative there. It's really hard to find somebody who speaks really good English, knows our technology well, is native Japanese, has an engineering background, can answer complex questions. We're looking, the job's open.”Source: http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/02/interview_epics.html