Epic Games Mark Rein Interview March 21, 2006 John JCal Callaham

Introduction

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FiringSquad: What will Epic be showing at GDC?

Mark Rein: We’re going to have some new and updated Unreal Engine 3 demos. We’ll be bringing along PlayStation3 and Xbox 360 to show demos on those platforms as well. We’ll have both a theatre presentation and private meetings in our Exposuite.

FiringSquad: How is it going on PS3?

Mark Rein: PlayStation3 development is coming along really nicely. We’re almost finished with our new multi-threaded renderer which will give us performance improvements on multi-core systems like Xbox 360 and PS3. We’ll be showing some early demos of it to our licensees during GDC. We’ll also have a new PS3 demo that we’ll show behind closed doors.

FiringSquad: What do you think about the recent announcements of Sony’s online network for PS3?

Mark Rein: We make online multiplayer games so obviously it is exciting for us to hear Sony talking about this and we hope to hear more details soon. It is great news that Sony is going to offer a free service and that publishers will be able to setup their own servers. This will give us some great flexibility.

FiringSquad: Sony said that should expect that every PS3 will have a hard drive – is that good or bad?

Mark Rein: If that is what they do then I think it’s a really smart move. It means developers can create features that rely on large amounts of fast, persistent storage knowing that every PS3 will have it. That’s a good thing. It also means Sony can create services knowing that they can leverage the hard drive and every PS3 customer can use them. For example if they wanted streaming HD movies on PS3 they could accomplish using the hard drive as a cache to help smooth out internet bottlenecks. I have no idea if they’re going to do something like that or not but we can definitely take advantage of having a hard drive on every machine.

FiringSquad: Will you use it for Unreal Tournament 2007 on PC?

Mark Rein Definitely. On the PC side if you’re playing Unreal Tournament 2004 and you go to a server which has a new content on it you’re able to download that content to your hard drive automatically and then join the game on that server. We’d like to be able to do that with UT2007 on PS3 if Sony will allow it. It certainly wouldn’t be possible on consoles without hard drives because most of that content is going to be larger than a typical console memory card could support. That’s just one example but there other things we can do knowing we have a hard drive on each machine.

SIDEBAR: Epic's Unreal engine has multiple engine licence deals with Midway, Atari, UbiSoft, VUGames, and most recently THQ

Epic Games Games Interview (con'd)

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FiringSquad: What is Epic’s feeling about PC game hardware and how will the Unreal engine be part of that?

Mark Rein: I wish I could report only good news but that’s not the case.


Unfortunately the bad side is getting really bad. It is getting harder and harder for the average consumer to buy a computer with a decent graphics chips in it. When I go to major electronics retailers I see that most of the machines being sold are using Intel Integrated graphics - including the vast majority of laptops. Some of the desktop machines don’t even have slots for discrete graphics cards which I find personally offensive. Laptops of course are mostly not upgradable so a bad laptop is a bad laptop forever and considering how many people are replacing desktop with laptops this is especially worrisome. It is really sad when you see the moniker “media” or “entertainment” attached to something with Intel Integrated graphics in it. I question the logic of developing dual-core CPUs and saddling them with ultra-low-end graphics especially considering that one of the big benefits of Windows Vista will be a hugely improved graphical user interface that will help improve productivity. There are some seriously expensive desktops and laptops with crappy graphics chips in them – these aren’t just the low-priced machines either. Intel salespeople are probably patting themselves on the back for these design wins but the truth is the more successful they are with this strategy the faster they could be killing off the PC games market and nobody has the balls to stand up and cry foul because Intel is so powerful.

If people take those machines home and try to play recent PC games on them they’re going to have a horrible experience and possibly give up on PC gaming altogether. Users aren’t educated in this area but when their new $1,500 PC says “no” to a decent PC game they’re going to just assume the PC games market had passed them by. This is sad because the difference in cost the PC manufacturer to put in a decent graphics chip isn’t very much.

We need to find a way to encourage manufacturers to offer more balanced systems with better graphics chips and understand that every user they convert to a gamer represents a potential higher-margin sale the next time and every user they discourage from gaming represents a potential lower-margin commodity purchaser later. We need those mainstream users to be trying PC games. It is nearly impossible to justify the cost of making games that scale down to integrated graphics when the next-gen consoles have so much graphics power and represent a huge upcoming market. How many publishers would bother bringing their latest games to PC if only the hardcore players could run them? Those customers have already proven they’re willing to spend $300 for a graphics card so expecting them to own a next-gen console isn’t much of a leap.

So despite the fact that I’m a big cheerleader for PC gaming I am worried about a potential for catastrophic failure of the PC gaming market. You’d think Intel would be worried about that too especially considering that none of the next-generation consoles use Intel CPUs.

We’d like to thank Epic’s Mark Rein for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions on Epic’s upcoming products. We wish Mark and Epic the best of luck in bringing Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 2007 to market later this year.