Earlier this week Epic Games reported that LucasArts signed a multi-year studio-wide licensing agreement to utilize Epic’s awesome Unreal Engine 3 across multiple platforms. According to Epic Vice President Mark Rein, “LucasArts is now primed to capitalize on Unreal Engine 3’s ability to scale across platforms, from mobile, through PC and console all the way up to the next generation of games.”
Now, I’m not entirely sure just how excited to get about all of this. Epic Citadel [Free] and Infinity Blade [$5.99] have done a great job showing just what the Unreal Engine 3 can do on the iOS platform. Technically speaking, if games are developed in UE3 with multiple platforms in mind, targeting iOS devices could all be part of the same development process that would result in Xbox 360, PS3, and PC games. Rein does specifically mention mobile gaming too, and there’s no disputing the fact that iOS is a main mobile platform currently.
However, LucasArts really has yet to get that involved in the world of iOS. Their App Store catalog is fairly barren, and only consists of Monkey Island remakes. I’d love to think that we’re about to get a bucket of amazing LucasArts Unreal Engine 3-powered games dumped on the App Store, but if this is just being announced now, it will likely be quite a while before we see any of the projects utilizing this engine.
Keep your fingers crossed, iOS-owning LucasArts fans!
