Epic Games' Mark Rein

Cliff's an idiot! [Laughs] I'm kidding, obviously.

Oh yeah. Hey, Cliff is Cliff, and he's making a console game, and that's what he's focused on, so that's what his thinking is all about. But as a company, we make PC games. We love the PC, it's our heritage, we want to see it be strong, and we want to sell games like Unreal Tournament III and Gears of War on PC, and have them sell as well as they do on console.

I mean, why not? There's way more PCs out there than there are consoles, but unfortunately most PCs out there are not capable of playing games and that's something that falls on all of us - the hardware manufacturers and publishers - to make people understand, and developers to make sure games run well on the lower-end stuff.

So the PC Gaming Alliance is a great opportunity for us to have a great, open, honest dialogue with all the different stakeholders in the PC business. One of the big problems of the PC business is there's no platform holder. And so many people are switching to laptops, and most laptops just don't have enough power to play these games. I'm not saying every computer needs an 8800 GTX, but at least give users an experience so they can experience games.

And then there's other problems - piracy's clearly a problem, and there's all kinds of other things again because the PC is not just a gaming platform. The idea behind the Gaming Alliance is to help the PC platform be a better gaming platform, and we totally support that. As soon as they invited us we said 'yes, here's our cheque'. It took all of ten minutes to decide we wanted to be involved in this.

I don't want to put words in their mouths, but some of our goals are to do what we can to push the graphics standards, minimum PC specs, to make sure developers are well-represented in this group, and that people understand the role that we play. And understand how we're entertainment software companies. We're not that much different to a movie company - we're content creators and we want to make sure that our voices are heard and it's not just a bunch of hardware guys talking about hardware.

Oh come on. Leave the guy alone.

I'm not going to say anything about that.

I'm not going to say anything about that.

Yeah, we're happy with how it's done. We sure as heck didn't pick the best time in the world to ship it. It was shooter heaven and we're up against five shooters with much larger marketing budgets than we had. So I'm not sure that was the greatest idea, but when it comes out of the oven you want to serve it hot, so...

But no, we're really happy - the PlayStation 3 version's done really well, the PC version's done okay too, you saw their numbers and it's not bad shipments. We're doing well and we're making improvements to the game too. We've got the mod stuff and there's tons of cool mods, and that's really starting to take off, especially on the PlayStation 3, so what can we do to make mods easier to find, to have a bit of a community, so that's one of the improvements we want to do - to bring a mod browser right into the game. We have a whole bunch of ideas. We're working on an update for the game right now. We shipped a really good game and we're going to make it better.

No. UT and Gears are pretty much it. We have two game teams and an engine team.

You can see we're improving things on the platforms we're already on, so why dilute our efforts for a platform that - hardware-wise - just isn't really suited to what we're doing?

If you're going to print crazy, ridiculous things, you might as well make them extra crazy.