While Epic Games has a long-standing heritage with the PC, recent years have signaled a shift in its business strategy. The Unreal Tournament developer has devoted an increasing amount of time and resources towards the console market, as evidenced by format exclusives like Gears of War 2. Why did Epic forgo its roots? Piracy.

Speaking to Develop, company present Mike Capps laments that rampant piracy pushed Epic away from the PC space:

If you walked into [Epic’s Offices] six years ago, Epic was a PC company. We still do PC, we still love the PC, but we already saw the impact of piracy: it killed a lot of great independent developers and completely changed our business model.

Capps’ views on the impact of piracy echo that of Crysis developer Crytek. Back in 2008, company CEO Cevat Yerli stated that piracy led the company to rethink its long-term business model. It of course followed through with those plans, as Crysis 2 and CryEngine 3 by extension have been targeted for multiple formats.

While developers such as Blizzard still remain solely committed to the PC platform, one could argue they are in a unique position, given that the world’s most popular fantasy MMO is behind their belt.

Epic: PC piracy ‘turned us to consoles’ [Develop]

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