Epic Apologises

Last week we brought you Cliff Harris’s rather long rant at Epic’s Mark Rein – who seemed to butt in slightly too much at a Develop panel.  Well, Epic founder Tim Sweeney has apologised on behalf of Rein with the following statement;

“Yeah, Mark Rein can jump in with guns blazing sometimes, invited or not. It’s all intended to be in good fun, but I guess it didn’t work out that way this time. Sorry!

To the ‘Epic was nice till Mark came along’ crowd, Mark’s been here since 1992. He’s a world-class dealmaker, and Epic would certainly not have survived to 2010 as an independent developer without his tenacity and business savvy. The ability to doggedly negotiate with publishers and platform markers has absolutely been key to retaining the freedom of our creative and technical folks.

Companies like Epic and Valve retain total creative control over our games. We work with publishers who do marketing and distribution, but what we build and when we’ll deliver it is up to us. The spirit is the same now as in the early days; what’s really changed is size (it takes 70+ developers to build a game like Gears) and process (you need some real organization and management to run this sort of company effectively).

When you have millions of customers, you can’t talk to them all. Many of the Epic folks are in frequent contact with enough gamers that we have a pretty clear idea of what the community is thinking, but with this scope of product you can’t respond as quickly or as pervasively. It’s a nice but real problem, and one smaller teams like y’all will share when faced with a runaway success.”

A good response there and we are pleased to see that things haven’t just descended into finger pointing and name calling.  Group hug anyone?

Source: CVG