Mike Capps [Epic CEO] interview

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Epic CEO: 'Talent Without Business Is Dangerous'By Susan Arendt February 12, 2008 | 4:45:22 PMCategories: DICE 2008

LAS VEGAS -- Giving development talent free rein is a risky proposition, says the CEO of Epic Games.

Creative thinking is all well and good, but someone needs to keep an eye on the bottom line, or "God knows what you end up with or how long it takes to get there," says Mike Capps.

Wired.com sat down with Capps during last week's DICE Summit to discuss how to launch a game that isn't news (he has no idea), why Epic won't be making a survival horror game anytime soon, and why making Gears of War was more fun than making Unreal Tournament.

And yes, he talks about a Gears sequel. Sort of.

"I was thinking Beers of War. You know, like Tapper."

First thing I wanted to ask about —

We gave the exclusive to GamePro, I'm sorry. I knew just what you were going to ask. My standard answer to that is "We hadn't considered doing a sequel, but if you think it's a good idea. I'm curious, would you buy it?"

Doing a sequel to a game that did really, really well. That's an idea, you should look into that.

We've done an Unreal sequel or two.

So I've heard. And there's this "Tournament" game, or something.

It's a spin off. It's like Charles In Charge, or something.

So I'm not going to get anything on that, am I?

Ask me again soon.

Leading off from that, and GamePro, which I know is near and dear to your heart, how do you decide when you are going to break something like that —

Like Gears?

For example. How do you decide print versus online, and which print do you go with or which online do you go with?

I hate to say it's so mercenary as who's got the most circulation, but that's a big factor. We almost always start in the U.S., I don't think we've ever gone with Europe, mostly because all the European press, I'm surprised they haven't changed this, but they're willing to take a European exclusive. They'll give you a cover for a European exclusive which is the same date as we put in a U.S. magazine, which is great. But nowadays, the profits we're making off a copy of Unreal Tournament sold in England, it's selling for fifty pounds, versus $50, and the cost of goods are the same, so it's three times as profitable, maybe? So you think we'd be focusing more on that market, but we aren't.

Why not?

Because we can do both. Like, we are definitely, for our product, it launched a week early in Germany, because we have such a strong following in Germany and we had a really strong showing at Leipzig last year. But in terms of how we decide to do it? It's really the, timing's the hard part. But once you have the timing down, it's really the 'how can you get tons of attention in the exact way you want?'

For example, Game Informer, when they do a cover to launch, they want a lot of info, and we don't always want to give it to them. Sometimes we want to start and just say, "Hey, this thing called Gears is coming -- wait." Or sometimes we want to show it at E3 behind closed doors. Like, the next Unreal Tournament, we announced with a cover for Computer Gaming World and all they had was the 'U' logo, and we said 'we're making an Unreal game.' So we actually had a huge press lead on UT3, maybe two and a half years. Very different than we would do with, than what we did with Gears, which I guess was E3 a year prior to ship.

We've recently seen the rise of gaming blogs and there's a big move from print to online. Does that ever factor into these kind of decisions?

The thing is, they'll all pick it up and you don't need to give them an exclusive. As strange as this is, the only reason we would do something exclusive with like a GameSpot or something like that is because they'll give you front billing for three or four days which really means a lot. That's a huge coverage, just in terms of eyeballs for hardcore gamers. So we'll often give them, like, an exclusive look at the weapons, or something like that, and be out there on the front of GameSpy, IGN, you name it. Large sites. But if we were to announce a product in Times Square, and have a big surprise, you know, Locusts come from underneath the ground, that's what I'd like to do, that'd be fun.

Every game wire's gonna pick it up anyway, so we don't need to call Kotaku beforehand, because they're gonna cover it, they're gonna slap it all over the page if it's news already. I guess the hard part is for people who are announcing a title that isn't news, and I don't know how to do that.

That's a happy problem.

Exactly! I have no idea how they do that. When it's like, "Were launching Commander's Fist number 8," and nobody cares, so they have to pay people to, I don't know.

So basically by sticking to print, you get the best of both worlds, because it's the online community's job to pick up everything that's hot.

Maybe that will change, but currently online follows everything else.

One of the main themes I'm seeing at this DICE is the idea that it's in a company's best interests to keep the suits, the corporate owners, away from the talent, the development teams. What do you think about that?

I think it's crazy. Because talent without focus on business is a really, really dangerous thing. Blizzard is a great example. I don't know how they've been so successful and as huge as they have. But to throw away a game three times. That's not necessarily something to be proud of in perhaps your methodology so much as that somebody somewhere up high has the willingness to say, "You know, it's not working." That's very different from saying you're producing efficiently. Does that make sense?

And you're talking specifically about?

Like Starcraft, I guess they threw away three engines, or something. I think they could've gotten it done quicker and faster through an iterative process that wasn't quite so... "Work forever, throw it away." And I think that's the thing that the CFO serves such a great purpose, there's somebody who's putting a control on the other side. At our office, it used to be me, and now it's Rod [Fergusson], who fights with Cliff[y B].

And it's a purposeful tension, because Cliff wants more, badder, cooler, stuff, and Rod says, this is all you can have and if you want cake, you're going to have to not eat pizza for dinner. And that tension is really important, and if you get into the "design is law," you lose your tension and then God knows what you end up with or how long it takes to get there.

I think that EA and Activision both kind of made the statement let the gamers go do their great thing, but they also had the "and here's where we go do marketing studies." I mean, they're being responsible -- they're going out and saying, "does anyone want to buy a game where you play in a rock band? Let's check that first before, you know, is Mom ever going to play drums?" They're doing that.

I don't think they're leaving them alone. I think if they came back and everybody said this is the stupidest thing ever, nobody's gonna want to play guitar in a video game, I donʼt think the dev team would be given a chance to go off and fly and be creative.

Do you see a difference between "Hey guys, you're spending too much money," and "Hey, this needs more cowbell"?

EA used to be notorious for that. Guy shows up on a jet, spends three hours in the office and says it needs to be bluer and taller, because if I don't add value I'm going to be upset with myself and they fly away. They seem to have really turned the corner on that stuff. So, yes, creative influence from executives is really dangerous.

[Epic CEO Tim] Sweeney knows that he doesn't know anything about games. He doesn't play games very often, but he can look at things and say, you're not pushing the tech the right way. This doesn't look as good as it could. He wants to make sure our products are cutting edge, but he could care less if in Gears when you're blind firing the gun does this or that. He doesn't have any influence on that. For sure he cares about budgets, as do I.

But getting them out of the creative process as in wishing they were frustrated designers -- yes, that's been a problem in the industry that seems to be going away. But getting them out of the creative process as in me pushing towards a marketable product, I think that's what you see the best corporations like Activision, EA, Warner Brothers, etc., doing right now.

So what do you see as your role with regards to a UT3 or a Gears 2? Not that we're saying you're making Gears 2, of course.

Of course. I'm the evil introspection guy. They're all running along and I'm the one who opens up the project and goes "hmmmm." You know, that kind of stuff.

Like when you said you didnʼt get the Mad World commercial?

Ouch.

Do you have a lot of moments like that, where you're like "I'm not seeing what you guys are seeing, but I trust you?"

Not very often. We agree on most things, we get along really well. I mean, except Mark [Rein]. Me and Mark can never agree on anything. I mean everyone else there, we agree. So that was one where it was about 70% of the people loved it and others hated it. And we like that kind of stuff. That's way better than where everybody goes 'I accept this and I'm not going to fight against it.' Those are the bad ones, right? Oh, guess what, we're using a twanging rock tune that goes with this thing that the art music guys are going to throw together. Nobody would've complained.

I'm still not sure that I get Mad World, for a number of reasons. I mean, Donnie Darko? Who's seen that movie in the last five years? But the commercial worked really well, and I put a lot of creative effort into that commercial and I think it came off really well. The song always just didn't quite work for me, but in the end it gave me chills.

During Gore Verbinski's keynote, he made the broad sweeping comment, "Why does everything have to be a first person shooter"-

Gears is a third person shooter.

True. So why does everything have to be some kind of shooter?

Why does everything have to be an action movie? You know? Come on, because they sell. That's a big part of it. We've looked at a lot of different IP ideas, and as much as I'd like to make an edgy horror game, you're niching yourself really badly with that. You might break out and hit Silent Hill numbers, but that would be a disaster for us. Instead of making something like a Gears sequel, which we think could do quite well, doing a game that's a big niche, like a Longest Journey style adventure game. Now I came out of Zork, I'm a text guy, I'd kind of like to do a text game. Or like a Loom game, half graphics, half text. But I'm not going to do that because I have a lot of mouths to feed at Epic. So that's part of it.

The other thing is that we make games that we want to make, and that happens a fair amount. RPGs get made because there are RPG weenies who love that stuff, which I am, too. We're shooter weenies at Epic, it's what we like doing. If I put Barbie in front of them and said, "But we're getting tons of money," I'd have people quitting. If I get a platformer, I'd have people quitting. It's just not dark enough, it's not badass enough. So we have to make games that will keep our guys happy and excited, because that passion is what makes our games cool. Because otherwise why bother?

But let's say someone came to you with an IP, and it was a survival horror, a Dead Space kind of very dark and violent kind of thing. Would you be willing to consider that, or is it just "Hey, we're the shooter people. We do fast awesome shooters, that's what we do, that's our identity"?

Well, we actually have a number of metrics for IP at Epic, and we have a process for submitting IP ideas and having it reviewed. It's not as simple as a point system, but you could call it a point system. Is this going to sell, how strong is the market for it? Nobody thought that, what's a good example, Baldur's Gate would sell. RPGs came out of nowhere, Diablo brought them back. You know, it's possible.

I'd love to take on the challenge of trying to make a horror game that could break past weird Silent Hill gamers and push out to the mainstream. FEAR sort of did, it didn't take off, but it sort of did. But at least I don't think there's a lot of people who didn't buy that game because it was too scary or too much of a niche horror game. I think it's possible. We talk about it.

It's also why we push our technology. If we do yet another shooter, Gears is very, very different than Unreal Tournament. People say it's another action shooter, but it's a streaming continuous world that's a totally different technology than taking an arena, throwing it out of memory, and loading another one. Everything, all the major systems got changed so much. And that's what made it possible for folks who use our engine to go make a Grant Theft Auto type game. We have that technology now because we took all those steps. So it's really good for us to grow what kind of things we do.

Is that the bottom line? If we can't make the game that has the potential to sell X units, we're not making it?

Wow. We haven't had to have that level of conversation yet. That hard discussion — but, you know, Gears was such a bet for us. It's crazy to say it now, but it was a huge bet because we basically said we're going to stop making Unreal. The only reason we kept making Unreal was because Epic had shopped it out to my company, Scion Studios, and then we merged the two together they became two teams.

But they stopped making Unreal, pushed it out, and said we're going to try something new, crazy, and different. And that was a really big deal for Epic, because they'd been making that franchise for seven years, I guess, maybe more.

I'm not sure exactly where I was going with that, but I guess what I'm saying is we're willing to stretch ourselves, and we feel like we stretch ourselves a lot as a multiplayer only company that put together a really strong narrative that won a lot of awards for those characters and suddenly we have this hugely valuable IP. And boy, that's fun! That's way more fun than making another Unreal Tournament, as much as we love Unreal Tournament, we've added so much value to our company and to our brand.

Now you've got the Gears franchise and the Unreal franchise, would you consider doing another third-person shooter, or would that dilute your brand too much?

There's a small minority who think that Gears and Unreal are too close and too similar. But it would be a little tougher if we'd made Drake's Fortune — it's Gears outside. It starts getting a little closer. So, I don't know if we would, that's a good question. Haven't thought about it much.

Besides your own stuff, of course, what do you play?

Played a lot of Rock Band lately. The EA guys really screwed me, 'cause I was hanging out with them, and everybody was talking about Rock Band, and I said, yeah I played Guitar Hero a while, and the next morning at nine a.m. there was a Rock Band waiting for me in my office. So I had shoulder surgery recently, and I couldn't play anything, not even Wii. But I could sing in Rock Band, so that's what I did to play video games to keep me going for a week or two was to sing in Rock Band.

So some of that. A little bit of everything. I play RPGs, I don't play much in RTSs, I keep buying them, I bought Chris Taylor's last one, and I bought Company of Heroes, and they're sitting there and I'm going to play them someday, I swear. I play all the shooters. I play all our licensees, which is getting to be quite a challenge.

It sounds cheesy, but it's really tough to run in to Ray [Muzyka] and it's like "What do you think of Mass Effect?" and if I said "Been meaning to try it man, thanks for all the awards, you make us look great. But I haven't" -- that would be really shitty, so I try to play all of ours.

What I used to do is cheat my way through. I'd play for a little while to get an idea of the combat loop, and then cheat the rest of the way through so I could see everything. And you can't do that on Xbox anymore, 'cause it's all like, you'll ruin the Achievement economy or some bullshit. So I gotta play it through.

What are your thoughts on Achievements?

It's a really great cumulative metagame for people who care about it. People who don't care about it don't even think about it. Perfect, how great is that, right? They had some problems with the economy of Achievements, of course. Like, 3,000 of my points are from games like King Kong. Tell you what I love, it's data mining. I know exactly how many people have played the third chapter of Gears of War, in co-op, as Dom, and have completed it in each difficulty level because I can count Achievements online. It's wonderful for us.

So I know -- I'm gonna make up the number because I'm probably not supposed to give away the number -- but say it's 10 million people who've played all the way through Gears 1, compared to the four and a half that we sold. And that's because of rentals, used, people sharing it with their friends. And that's just the online numbers, so if you take those 10 million, and you expand it out, that means 15 million people have played it all the way through and weren't online because they don't have Live. It's just sick. It's so great for data mining. I know exactly how many people have played ten rounds of each multiplayer game types, I know what game types are popular. Not just with stats, but also with Achievements.

So that's been really useful to us. Especially for co-ops, it's really valuable for us to know how many people are playing co-op, and it's a lot of people playing through. It was great for... you play co-op with your girlfriend. If we are ever to make another one I want to really focus on making that easier to do because the splits were the tough part. You could be playing with someone who wasn't as good as you, split, and then they die a whole lot because they didn't realize that you were really killing everything.

So, being able to see that and know that it was a good investment of our time, it wasn't just a back of the box feature that made a few people happy, it was a serious number of people who really enjoyed co-op, and played it again and again and again. That's awesome. It's really useful for us. So, yeah, Achievements rock.

Oh, and the other reason it rocks? Because I played Orange Box on 360 for the Achievements. It's a PC game, should be played on the PC, I own it on Steam, but played it on 360 for the Achievements. That's brilliant.

When is UT3 coming to 360?

We haven't announced a date but pretty darn soon, as you can imagine. We were an exclusive with Sony for UT3, shipped it December 11th in the US, it's coming worldwide pretty darn soon. We just couldn't get that done last year. It's exclusive for a little while, but yeah, it's definitely in production.