Epic's Gamble warns against TV, film distractions

Epic Games' European territory manager Mike Gamble has spoken GamesIndustry.biz about the danger of shifting studio focus away from video games.

"It's really easy to be distracted by shiny baubles, whether that be pre-vis on films, doing stuff for car manufacturers, whatever it happens to be. In the end you can end up chasing these things and your core business is then neglected," he said.

He suggested that part of the danger lay in the financial differences that exist between the films and games industries.

"We don't know how they operate, we don't know what their usual financial terms are and we could end up wasting time, money and spinning our wheels there," he explained.

"Where as we know we can concentrate on what we do and we do really well, and there's a massive market still untapped for what we do already."

At E3 this year Ubisoft spoke to GamesIndustry.biz about its plans to move into TV and film production. Gamble said he believed for Epic to do the same would be "foolish."

"At the end of the day we're a games and technology developer, so to go into the games industry would be kind of foolish, because we don't know anything about it. Why should we succeed there?"

"That's kind of arrogant to assume if you're very good at this and it's kind of similar to that then you must be good at that."

You can read the interview in full here.