Unreal Tournament 3 will be available for the Xbox 360 and Epic Vice President Mark Rein has given some more insight as to why the game is making its rounds from the PC to the 360 in comments made to Game Informer. UT3 was originally slated to be an exclusive title for the PS3, but after the phenomenal success of Gears of War on the 360, the company rethought this exclusivity for Sony’s machine and decided that releasing UT3 on the 360 was a good move to sell more units.
Rein said, "Honestly, we view Gears of War as our showcase title for the 360, and we really view UT as our showcase title for the PS3. Now that we shipped Gears, people who are interested in licensing our technology can see we have a mature title that works, it plays really well, it sold great. We’ve always felt that UT was our poster child for PS3, you know getting UT done and up and running and running well would give us the same sort of benefits that Gears has given us on 360."
But in spite of the original intentions for UT3 to be an exclusive title on the PS3 platform, Rein explained the shift in marketing to the 360 community as a good move to expand the audience for the title, in light of the tremendous success of Gears of War. He said, "… and now you’ve obviously seen that we have this ability to potentially sell a lot of copies. There’s a large audience, and it just makes sense to do. I don’t think it’s anything we thought we weren’t going to do–we just want to focus on UT3 on PS3 to start [originally]."
Rein took the opportunity to say that, in his opinion, the PS3 is far from dead. "They sold more PS3s in North America than Microsoft sold Xbox 360s in its same period of time, and they clearly aren’t going to have the shortage problems that Microsoft had. So as long as people are willing to pay the price for the machine–and I’m sure lots of people are–I think they’re hopefully in a good situation. I think they’ve done a good job with their downloadable content. There’s not a lot of games on there, but the ones that are there are really high quality, and I’m really impressed with the games. It’s a beautiful machine, it’s a great-looking piece of equipment, so I think Sony’s going to be fine."
As more titles that were once exclusive to the PS3 begin to migrate more often to the 360, it may be an indication that the game industry wants to market its products to the widest possible audience. The idea of making games exclusive to a particular game console may not only be counter-productive for business, but it may also be a concept that has outlived its usefulness.
