Last December, Epic Games’ former president Mike Capps announced he was retiring from the company, but would stay on the board of directors in an advisory capacity. According to a post on Joystiq, however, his tenure even in that role has ended.

Capps wrote on his Facebook page last night:

“When we announced that I wanted to transition out of my leadership role at Epic, the plan was for a continued but less active role, service on the board of directors, and ideally, being that eccentric semi-retired guy who still comes to playtests and gold parties. I’m sad to say that plans have changed, and as of February 11th, I’m no longer affiliated with Epic Games. (I thought it best for Epic’s staff to hear it first, and the announcement was made today, so now I’m sharing this more widely.)

I have many wonderful memories of my time at Epic, and I wish my friends there all the best in their future projects.

So what’s next for me? Games have been so good to me, and I’m delighted to have the time to give back. I’m a member of several game industry boards, and I’m proud to serve as an advocate for our art in Washington. I’m considering seats on a few company and advisory boards, as well as options for teaching at one of the world-class universities in the North Carolina Triangle area. And mostly, I’m focused on being a new dad in a few short weeks. Time is flying by, and I’ve still got a dozen games I want to play before the UnSleep begins!”

The statement seems to raise a few questions as to what’s happened between Capps and the company he founded, though at the very least, the split seems relatively amicable and drama-free (certainly on the face of it, I should point out).

Epic Games released this statement on the new status quo at the Unreal Engine studio:

“When Mike Capps retired last year, he stayed on the board in an advisory role. As we’ve been mapping out the future for the new Epic Games, we decided it was best to get a fresh start with the new management. We thank Mike for his years of service at Epic and we wish him well in retirement and fatherhood.”

So there we go. Where will Capps show up next? What will the new Capps-free Epic Games look like? I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

Via Joystiq

Epic Games President Mike Capps announced on the company’s blog this afternoon that he is officially stepping down from his presidential duties at the game company. He will remain on the company’s board of directors and will maintain activeness in helping steer the company in the right direction.

In his brief farewell letter, Capps offered a few reasons for his departure:

“If you haven’t heard, I have a baby boy on the way. I’m fortunate that with Epic’s success and generosity, I can be a stay at home dad for a while. My wife Julianne and I are very happy in Raleigh, and other than cleaning up baby barf, I don’t have much planned. I might do some teaching, spend more time on creative writing, and maybe get more active with a few charities.”

During Capps’ time at Epic, the company launched dozens of franchises and games, including the critically-acclaimed Gears of War series, the Unreal series, the XBLA hit Shadow Complex and mobile game smash Infinity Blade. Fortunately, Capps will be around in some capacity to continue creating new Epic experiences like those.

“After dedicating a decade of my life to Epic, and with so many close friends here, it’s impossible to just walk away. I absolutely love this company. If you cut me, I think I probably bleed nanoblack and Imulsion. (Wow, just think about what mixing those would do…) Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney and other board members asked me to stay on the board, and I’m thrilled to do so as I’m truly excited about our future games and Unreal Engine 4.”

Capps is not the first major Epic employee departure of this year – Cliff Bleszinski, former design director at Epic, left in early October for pastures elsewhere. Whether or not those pastures are greener have yet to be revealed. But the man sure does love teasing us.

We wish the best of luck to Mr. Capps in his ventures and extend our thanks for years of freaking sweet games. Heck, we couldn’t have learned shotgun wall-bouncing anywhere else but Gears.

[via Epic Games]

Today, Epic Games published a press release to announce the launching of their brand new studio in Seattle—an office that will be exclusively dedicated to accelerating the development of Unreal Engine 4.

Said Epic’s president, Mike Capps:

“The proximity to key partners, the density of world-class talent and all the factors that make Seattle an attractive place to live convinced us that it is the perfect locale for Epic’s West Coast operation. We are looking to hire even more of the best engineers around to contribute to Unreal Engine 4, which we believe is set to change the way we all make games.”

Seattle, as many of you may know, is home to plenty of game companies—and that’s not even counting the just-outside-Seattle locations of Microsoft and Nintendo’s American headquarters in Redmond, Washington. So there’s that.

We caught a glimpse of the new game engine from Epic around E3 time back in June…check the video up top if you’d like a reminder of some of the visual craziness they’ve got in store for the future of games.

Just before E3 crazy took hold of the gaming world this week, it was announced that many former employees of shuttered Big Huge Games, the 38 Studios subsidiary responsible for Kingdoms of Amalur, would be joining Unreal Engine-makers Epic Games.

A post on Joystiq from yesterday offers up some more details about the hires that will now be forming Epic Baltimore. The company’s vice president, Mark Rein, said that president Mike Capps made the call to bring the developers on board.

“Mike is the total hero there. They called him on Wednesday, interested in using one of our IPs. He flew them up the next day and they met with a whole bunch of people, and the board of directors of Epic. We made the call right there: ‘These guys are awesome, we need to work with them.’

We don’t have a final headcount yet. It’s a decent number. Many of the people there had already gone on to places. This was just the core group of really experience guys who already had savings saved up that they tried to build a team and find a deal.”

Epic Baltimore will be working with one of the company’s pre-existing IPs, it seems. In response to whether or not Epic would be rescuing the Amalur IP from the ruins of 38 Studios, Rein said, “We don’t buy IP, we make IP.”

Fair enough! Get ready for Kingdoms of Bulletstorm: Unreal Edition.

Via Joystiq

During PAX East, Epic Games’ Mike Capps revealed that while a sequel to last year’s Bulletstorm was under consideration for developer People Can Fly, but that a different project was found for the Polish studio that better suits them, says a post on Gamespot.

“We thought a lot about a sequel, and had done some initial development on it, but we found a project that we thought was a better fit for People Can Fly,” Capps is quoted as saying. “We haven’t announced that yet, but we will be announcing it pretty soon.”

While news of Epic working on a PC-exclusive game has been floating around the internet since Capps mentioned it at PAX East, let’s not forget that there was news back in November that People Can Fly might be working on prequels for the Gears of War franchise.

In fact, while a post on Joystiq speculates that PCF may, in fact, be working on the aforementioned PC game, I have a feeling that won’t be the case, especially since Capps explicitly mentions how piracy of the PC version of Bulletstorm hurt that game’s sales:

“We made a PC version of Bulletstorm, and it didn’t do very well on PC and I think a lot of that was due to piracy. It wasn’t the best PC port ever, sure, but also piracy was a pretty big problem.”

My money’s on the prequels. Why? Because there was a rumor, and because if I’m right, I’ll feel REALLY SMART.

Gamespot via Joystiq

According to a post on Eurogamer from yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation—also more commonly known as the FBI—has licensed the usage of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3. Apparently they’ll be using the development tools for creating better and more awesome training simulations.

The deal is a part of the US government’s deal with Virtual Heroes, a developer that makes simulations for  multiple branches of “the US and allied governments.”

“We recognize the growing market needs of our government customers and are excited to have Virtual Heroes provide a full spectrum of focused services and support using our game engine technology,” said Epic’s Mike Capps.

No word yet on whether or not the FBI is working on making chainsaw guns. My guess: probably.

Via Eurogamer

After an interview between Gears of War developer Epic Games and GamesIndustry, the gaming internets have been pointing out the highlights—namely, that the company’s new intellectual property is going to be “radically different” from its work on the Gears franchise.

A Eurogamer post points out some key quotes from Epic’s president, Mike Capps, regarding the in-development IP:

“So this is going to be one of those projects where we try something totally different, and it just went ‘boom’, because everyone had this pent up energy to do something new. And I can’t wait for them to get back to something like Gears in the future, because it’s sort of our bread and butter, and they’re going to be more energized for it too […]I’m so scared that people will just say, ‘oh yeah, that looks like an Epic game, oh sure’ because I want them to see it as a departure, but I don’t want anyone to say, ‘that doesn’t look anything like an Epic game, forget it, I’m not interested.’ So we’re actually nervous, we haven’t been nervous like this for a while! […] I’m nervous, this is something I pushed for a lot and I wrote some of the script for the trailer and if everyone hates it that’s it, I’m out of games for a while.”

Not really much in the way of details, but when Epic’s game gets announced at Spike TVs VGAs this weekend, expect the unexpected. I’m guessing it probably has something to do with ponies. Ponies are cool, right?

Also unknown is the game’s platform(s). In the interview, Capps rules out development work for the PlayStation Vita, but as to whether or not the next game will be another Xbox exclusive, we’ll have to wait and see. I suspect it’ll probably be cross-platform or possibly even PlayStation exclusive, considering they may want to branch out to more consumers this time around.

Over on another post on IndustryGamers, there are yet more highlights from Capps’s interview, during which point he discusses the difficulties of being in an industry with “shockingly immature” business senses:

“Our games industry is shockingly immature from a business perspective, because so few folks have business experience before coming in, or an education for business […]It’s awesome because it’s entrepreneurship gone right, that’s what our industry comes from, and that’s really exciting, but there’s not a lot of sharing, there’s not a lot of great game business ‘how to’ books, so we try to share and people listen to us, for some reason, and we try to learn as much as we can from everybody else and their mistakes. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

I’m telling you, dudes. Get ready: Gears of Pony: Mayhem is Magic.

Via Eurogamer and IndustryGamers

Famed gamed developer Epic Games, the company behind Unreal and Gears of War, has expressed interest in Nintendo’s new HD console. Since the console is on graphical par with the XBOX 360 and PS3, the developer is looking to possibly release future projects on the platform. Epic Games President Mike Capps expressed his history with the Nintendo Wii:

“We haven’t made an official announcement about that platform. And while we loved the Wii, it just wasn’t a fit to make a game that would go across Xbox 360, PS3 and the Wii. It just wasn’t possible. So going forward, we’re working with those folks and we’re very interested in the Wii U,” Capps said.

He went on to talk about the process of how Epic Games develops for platforms:

“We find that the best way to support a platform is to be making a game for it and we don’t currently have a game in development for that platform. For example, we don’t officially support Android, although we have demos that work on Android… But we officially support iPhone because we’ve made a game and we know it works. We know how to get through the certification process – we know it could. That’s sort of important to me; as a game developer who’s selling an engine, I want to make sure that I can ship a game on it myself, which is why we have very clear public support of PS3, Xbox 360, PC and iPhone but not as clear when it comes to Android or Wii U,” he said.

An interesting precursor to future development for the Wii U is the fact that Epic’s own Unreal Engine was used to develop many of the games that have been announced for Nintendo’s system.

“At the launch event at E3, some of the products that you saw running on Wii U were based on Unreal Engine technology. So that kind of gives you an idea of where we are in that space. You can certainly use our engine on that platform – it’s a natural fit from a technology perspective,” Capps said. “It opens up some doors that weren’t open before on current generation consoles because it is going to be a powerful box. I’m sure [Epic VP] Mark Rein would love anyone who’s interested to know how official our support is to get in touch with him!”

via IndustryGamers

Epic President Mike Capps is legitimately concerned these days that cheap apps and games on mobile phones will soon start to steal sales away from full retail sales. In an interview with IndustryGamers, Capps detailed his view of the gaming populous, and what experiences will take precedent with players that have shrinking pools of free time.

“If you think about what many people are doing… What game did I play today? What game did I play yesterday?” Capps asked. “If I have 30 minutes to game, what am I going to play? That more and more gets taken up with mobile games.”

This is not a new movement either. According to Capps, there are too many cheap alternatives to video games to sustain the mammoth, $60 products that are currently produced.

“I think the biggest competition for Shadow Complex was Netflix – not Castle Crashers (great game) or Limbo, but if you fired up your dashboard right there if you already bought Netflix you have tons and tons of awesome content that’s bite sized in 1.5 to 2 hour chunks,” Capps said. “So that was our competition, getting mindshare in the dashboard, more than it was against the other games in the space.”

Capps also pointed to the widespread piracy of Crysis as another mindshare thief.

“So rapidly available, free entertainment hurts us just the same way as if everyone pirates Crysis – that doesn’t help Bulletstorm at all since they’ve all gotten a free, really awesome game from the Crytek guys then,” Capps said. “So why would they pay for our game?”

While we gamers tend to scoff at any doom-saying about our past time, there’s some wisdom to what Capps is saying. I’ve probably put more time into Fieldrunners HD over the past week than any retail game, and that’s mainly because the only time I can squeeze in gaming is on the bus, taking a dump, or waiting for an order at a restaurant.

Being an adult is hard y’alls. That said, I desperately want there to be a Gears of War 3 waiting for me when I take a two-week staycation. Also I found a way to play video games at work so I’m kind of cheating the system here.

In what’s hopefully the first entry in a new series of promotional videos, Epic President Mike Capps muses on the mental state of thugs after being kicked off a building, Jack Handy style. Check out the video for revealing pictures of Capps and… dicktits.

Bulletstorm launches on February 22, 2011, so start scrubbing out your ears now.

[via Facebook]