Gears of War is one of those studio-owned IPs that you would never expect to see on the PlayStation 3. There's too much history between the franchise and the Xbox 360. If Epic Games president Mike Capps could just have things his way, though, he'd bring the whole Gears experience to Sony's home video game console too.
"Do we wish we could take all those Killzone [players] and Resistance fans on PS3, and get them to say 'Gears is awesome'? Yeah, sure I'd love to ship the Gears trilogy on PlayStation. That would be fun. I want to be there; I want to be everywhere," he told Industry Gamers during an interview at this year's Game Developers Conference.
Although Epic wholly owns the Gears of War IP, chances are it's still not going to happen. According to Capps, their loyalty to Microsoft when it comes to the Gears of War franchise stems from the effort that the gaming giant and platform holder put into marketing the entire series as a flagship example of what the Xbox 360 home video game console can do.
"I don't regret what we're doing with Microsoft," they added. "They make it worthwhile all the time... We were both taking a risk, and it paid off in a huge way for Gears. The amount of support they put behind Gears... it was really to launch their platform, to show what Xbox 360 could do – the whole HD experience with Samsung. I think we really delivered that. So we continue to get love from Microsoft in a way that I don't think we could get from a publisher focused on cross-platform."
"Time and time again, when it came down to figure out what we do next with Gears, we sat down with Microsoft and they've given us really good, compelling reasons to work with them again," Capps added. "They don't just market it; they do amazing work and they have a user testing team that makes our games better, and so each time we've come to the point of 'what do we do next?' we've been happy to work with them. They help us make a better product and do some really cool marketing on the platform, so we save some money there."
The next entry in the Gears of War franchise, Gears of War 3, is lasted for launch on September 20 exclusively on Xbox 360.