Epic Games president Mike Capps announced at his Tokyo Game Show panel today that the Gears of War and Unreal Engine developer is expanding its empire into Japan. It may also have grander plans for Epic Games Japan.
Capps said that the Tokyo office would focus "mostly [on] technical support and sales support," with Epic Games having an "expectation of much closer relationships with Japanese studios." But, after praising the Japanese development community as one of the strongest in the world, he said "we may have secret plans to hire some Japanese game developers too."
Capps said that publisher/developer Square Enix—which licensed Epic's game engine for The Last Remnant—embedded a handful of its developers at the company's Raleigh headquarters to study Epic's processes. Epic later returned the favor, sending some of its staff to Square Enix to support the dev team. Capps said that the Unreal Engine team's size—about 20 people—prohibits the team from making visits like that frequently, something that the Tokyo based office aims to rectify.
Epic currently has an office in Seoul, Korea to handle similar support efforts.