No promise of the future, says Capps

With mergers and acquisitions, there is always the risk that tools and engines may become unavailable said Epic's president Michael Capps.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at GDC, where he downplayed rumours of a Microsoft acquisition, Capps noted that there is never any promise of what comes in the future when it comes to middleware.

EA's purchase of Criterion - and with it, Renderware - was just one example of the risk.

"To be frank, the Midway guys were a Renderware shop through and through," Capps noted.

"And Renderware kind of fell out from under them right when they were making their decision for the next-generation of technology. So they had the code and they could have keep going that route, and they were really scared that if they went with [Unreal Engine] that they would have that same problem."

Midway ended up using the Unreal Engine as the basis of their next-gen tech, powering releases such as Stranglehold and BlackSite: Area 51.

"I mean, there is nothing we can do to convince someone that we are all not going to be hit by a bus tomorrow, right?," asked Capps.

"I can't force my guys to keep working on the engine. Someone could start a really cool shop next door and take them all," he admitted.

Epic has chosen to address the problem by doing everything it can to ship a complete engine, with complete documentation, so everyone using it could make and ship games even if the company stopped coding tomorrow.

"Our contracts don't promise the future - it is what you get now. And then, of course we keep adding stuff, because it is good business.

"And we give all the source code - every line of source code - and that's crucial. Because we require it from our own middleware partners.

"When it happens, and it always does, that we're right about to ship and there is one bug in the code, we want to be able to fix it and go."

Capps specifically noted that one of its partners, Aegia, was just purchased by Nvidia.

"It could have been really hard for us," he said. "It turns out that they got bought by someone who really wants to keep them going and work with us closely, but that is a major dependency for us, so we make sure we've got the source code so we can protect ourselves."

"So we understand how developers think, I guess, because we think that way."

The full interview with Epic's Michael Capps can be read here.