Epic Games has stated that it does not plan on releasingInfinity Blade, or any other Epic game, on Android phones any time soon, citing a lack of consistency and Google not being “evil” enough.
“When a consumer gets the phone and they wanna play a game that uses our technology, it’s got to be a consistent experience, and we can’t guarantee that,” explained Epic overlord Mark Rein. “That’s what held us off of Android.”
“If you took the underlying NGP hardware and shipped Android on it, you’d find far far less performance on Android,” added Tim Sweeney. “Let’s say you took an NGP phone and made four versions of it. Each one would give you a different amount of memory and performance based on the crap [networks] put on their phone. Google needs to be a little more evil. They need to be far more controlling.”
Several Unreal Engine 3 games are on the Android marketplace, but such games often exceed the Android OS’ file size cap of 50MB. In order to put something likeInfinity Blade, for example, on Android, one would have to pay extra fees for the 850MB download.
I’m sure many would disagree that Google needs to control the Android market more, but I definitely get what Mark is saying. The Android market is a messy wild west right now, and it does put game developers off. There’s a reason why so many developers favor iOS over the more popular Android OS, and it’s because of that controlled, consistent environment.
