Epic's Mark Rein

The two companies are very smart. They invested a lot in R&D, they have very good hardware that still has plenty of life left in it and they're both relaunching it with new experiences. We'll see new consoles, but they're a long way off. Look at Sony's financial situation - it's pretty clear they need to amortise this machine over a longer period.

Let's look at, say, Christmas next year. Where both PS3 and 360 will be at that point will be mature titles, developers knowing how to get more power out of them, auxiliary experiences like movie downloads and all that stuff.

I should be very careful what I say here...

I'll just come out and say it.

Over half the users who played Gears of War 2 so far do not have HDTVs. [Dramatic pause.]

I think that tells you there are still a lot of people making the leap to HD.

No. My point is, of the systems that are out there now, the majority of them aren't plugged into HDTVs. So there's no way we're ready for the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox Whatever.

Or the beaming.

I don't know. That was a weird comment.

People talk about, 'The Wii has run away with this generation.' I don't think that's true. Nintendo's made a lot of money and the software developers on that platform are scratching for seconds.

Microsoft is clearly a big market for third-party games. PS3 has a smaller installed base, but it's still millions of users. I'm sure Bobby still sold three, four, five million copies of Modern Warfare.

I think he's just frustrated in that he hasn't sold seven or eight million, like he has on 360. The truth is Sony has had a difficult year and I think they had to do what they had to do to try to be profitable. They have their own financial issues to solve and lowering the price of the console would probably have made their situation worse. They will get around to it in their own good time. If you're willing to look at this as a long-term play, they're going to be just fine.

I don't think that's a threat. That's two great companies putting themselves together and that's cool. The Bethesda guys are really smart, they make great games, and obviously so do id, so my reaction was, 'Wow, that's awesome!' The CEO of Bethesda's a friend of mine so I called him to congratulate him.