Triple-A games "inevitable" for iPad - Rein

Epic Games VP Mark Rein has told GamesIndustry.biz that he believes the iPad will become an obvious destination for well-known, triple-A games.

Speaking in an interview at last week's GameHorizon conference, Rein explained that the march of technology meant that platforms like the iPad - which bring an increasing sense of immersion to games - change the gaming environment for good.

"It's inevitable, because once the genie's out of the bottle, it's out," he explained. "You can't un-shoot a gun, right? Once people get a taste a something higher quality, they can't go back.

"You're not watching a lot of black and white, 4:3 television at home, are you? Sure there's some nostalgia factor there, but for the most part people aren't going back and playing 20 year-old games because the technology surpasses them and now they have much better experiences that are more immersive.

"And once you have a taste of immersion, your suspension of disbelief that you had before when you had clunky 16 bit pixels on the screen, it goes away. You just don't go back and watch silent movies in black and white. I'm not saying there's no market for that, but it's not mainstream."

He also underlined the importance of marketing for anybody hoping to see commercial success, as the company's Unreal Development Kit passes 250,000 downloads.

And he agreed that there was a risk with UDK games that, like the App Store, a small number of games might download in droves, while beyond those a vast mass of titles would be seen by only a handful of people.

"Absolutely," he explained. "And that's what I was trying to address in the talk [at GameHorizon] - distribution without marketing is just distribution. You have to have marketing, you have to have a conversation with the customers."

The full interview with Mark Rein is available now.