Epic: Consoles need to adapt to the way consumers "are willing to spend their money"

Epic president Mike Capps believes console makers need to become comfortable with allowing micro-transactions and smaller virtual items for purchase, and in the future it could be detrimental to the next iteration of consoles if developers are prevented from setting virtual content prices.

Speaking in an interview with Develop, Capps said the way consumers are "willing to spend their money has changed," and consoles will lose developers to PC if the hardware makers are not willing to adapt.

"Game revenue has moved to the service model and the microtransactions model," he said. "Consoles need to start being comfortable with that. They need to be able to do something where small virtual items can be sold and bought for 20¢ without a long certification process and a price approval process.

"Right now we’re not even allowed to change the prices of virtual content. We’re not even allowed to set the prices. I just don’t think this protectionist approach is going to be successful in a world where the price of virtual items changes on a day-today basis.

"Double-A games will never come back unless we get rid of this notion of a game being $60 or not released. The console manufacturers need to let this happen. The best way of driving developers to PC is telling them they have no freedom in what prices they can set for virtual items.

"It would be great to have the level of freedom that, say, Steam gives you."