Epic Games has named iOS hack-'em-up Infinity Blade as the studio's most profitable title to date, beating out games in the Gears of War series in the process.

The claim was made by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who told attendees at GDC Taipei that Chair Entertainment's release is now one of the most lucrative properties in the publisher's portfolio.

"The most profitable game we've ever made, in terms of man years invested versus revenue, is actually Infinity Blade," said Sweeney.

"It's more profitable than Gears of War."

It's everywhere

Sweeney made the admission while discussing Epic's startegy for Unreal Engine 4, which – as well as increasing the level of visual quality, performance and efficiency overall – will enable developers to build "games that can scale from a smartphone to a high end PC."

"We expect an unprecedented amount of content portability for the future," he added.

"The tools investment is paying off. Artists are able to build content more productively than before. And with the Unreal Engine as a whole, we found it's much easier to scale down from high end to low end devices than in this generation."

It's all part of Epic's 'Unreal Everywhere' strategy, which Sweeney describes as a plan to "put this one engine on all platforms worldwide", so that developers don't have to substantially rework their titles for new platforms.

Upwards and outwards

Furthermore, Sweeny revealed that he is "very very surprised to see how fast smartphone and tablet devices are improving", claiming that these devices are advancing faster than the pace described in Moore's law .

"We expect DirectX technology to be widely available on these mobile devices in the next few years," he said.

"The lowest end device [the iPad 2] is still a DirectX 9 device!"

Finally, the Epic CEO also shed some light on the investment his company recently received from Chinese internet outfit Tencent.

The social network operator and web services provider purchased a minority stake in Epic, although the terms of the investment have not been disclosed.

Sweeney was coy on the details of this new partnership, but hinted that, "you might in the future see the Epic relationship span different publishers and different platforms across the world."

[source: Gamasutra]