Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has said that its Infinity Blade franchise on iOS is its most profitable gaming title ever. According to the Sweeney, in terms of investment to profit, Infinity Blade even beats out its hugely successful Gears of War franchise. Sweeney made the comments at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in Taipei today where he also told the audience that the performance of smartphones and tablets has been outpacing Moore's Law in the past few years, while freemium games are the future.

Infinity Blade is 'the most profitable game we've ever made — in terms of man years invested versus revenue, it's more profitable than Gears of War,' said Sweeney. 'The lowest end device [the iPad 2] is still a DirectX 9 device!' he added noting that the iPad 3 is approaching the XBox 360 and PS3 for graphics performance. He also said that Epic is 'very very surprised to see how fast smartphone and tablet devices are improving.'

Sweeney also said that the future of gaming in the US lies with freemium titles. The Asian market, he argued, offered a great model for the US gaming scene to follow where the free to play online gaming model had taken off. However, he countered by saying that equally, the Asian gaming scene could learn from the production values in the top US titles. The days of going into a game store to buy a gaming disc is 'going to change rapidly.'

'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 told the audience. Epic's model moving forward will be to build scalable games that can be more easily ported across all platforms as part of its 'Unreal Everywhere' strategy. The company's aim is to put the Unreal engine on 'all platforms worldwide,' including PC online, Flash-based browsers, iOS, Android and gaming consoles. [via Gamasutra]

By Electronista Staff

Post tools:

TAGS :  

gaming, iPhone apps, iPad, iPad apps, iOS, Epic Games