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Interview

Mark Rein: Part Two

22-Sep-2006 Epic's ever-vocal VP talks Unreal Engine 3, the future of the PC and that Wii devkit in the second part of our exclusive chat

It's always a pleasure to speak to Mark Rein. The Epic VP lives up to his studio's name in both vision and opinion, never shying away from dropping a few controversial thoughts or letting the world know what he thinks.

His upcoming titles, the eagerly-awaited Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 2007, have already got shooter fans falling over themselves in anticipation, and Unreal Engine 3 has taken the industry by storm with companies like BioWare, EA, and Sony snapping-up Epic's tech to construct their next-gen titles.

In the second part of our recent chat, Rein sways away from his upcoming mega-titles and talks about the games industry as a whole, touching on the raging success of Unreal Engine 3, the future of the PC market and Epic's recently acquired Nintendo Wii dev-kit.

So without further ado, it's over to Mr. Rein...

Are you surprised by the runaway success of Unreal Engine 3?

Mark Rein: No. I know that doesn't sound very humble (laughs). You know, we're a small company; 80 people with three teams; two game teams and an engine team and we have been working on this engine for four years now at least. The goal is to be able to be competitive with the biggest companies with the biggest resources, and build something like Gears of War with a reasonably-sized team without having to have 80 people working on it. To do that we really had to spend a lot of money and a lot of time creating the best tools that we could, creating for ourselves a huge advantage over all of our competitors or all the people who aren't using our technology. Creating ourselves this great advantage by concentrating on tools, by pouring in all the money we made from the last game and all the money we made from engine licensing back into building a great engine.

And most developers can't afford to do that; I mean it's an expensive process. If your job is to ship a game - if that's what you get paid for, nobody pays you to make technology, they pay you to ship something. Publishers' money and publishers' own internal teams are not paid to build cool stuff, they're paid to ship games because that's where their money comes from. So we're fortunate that in being independent and being small and profitable we've been able to re-invest a lot of our profits into creating great tools. It doesn't surprise me that people go 'oh, Epic can make Gears of War with an average team size of 25?!' - I mean, we're probably a little short; that's definitely cutting it close. Then at times the team has grown to 40 people as we've stolen some guys from UT but for the most part the average size of the team has been about 25 or-so. And people look at that and they say: 'how are they doing that? We've got to look at this Unreal Engine technology and see if we can apply it in our shop'. I think that's really what's happened; people have seen that and said 'we could do that, we could benefit from that'.

So it doesn't surprise me that people want to find a way to offset the higher cost of making next-generation content.

A lot of traditionally PC-centric developers are now moving over to console development. Where do you see the PC market going? Is it in decline?

Mark Rein: It's tough. You know my diatribe about Intel integrated graphics and how I think that's hurting the marketplace. I mean, I went to PC World in the UK; I went to PC World and I walked around their shelves and I had my Blackberry out. I wrote myself an email and every time I saw something with integrated graphics I would put an 'I', and every time I saw something with a decent nVidia card I would put an 'N', a decent ATI card I would put an 'A' and I did a count of integrated graphics, which includes ATI's crappy integrated graphics which they sell to intel and Intel sells on, and the point is that 80% of the laptops were integrated graphics. 55% of the desktops - this is at this particular store, and that's an enthusiast store too, it's not just Best Buy like we have in the US; it's a high-end PC store. 55% of desktops were integrated graphics, and some of those weren't upgradeable at all even though they were desktops.

The truth is I was very surprised by that 55% number because I expected that to be higher. But when I looked carefully, the machines that didn't have integrated graphics were £1300 and up - that is not a cheap computer, those are expensive machines and they happen to sell a lot of expensive machines. And the laptops that didn't have integrated graphics again were expensive gaming-model laptops. But the problem is all the other machines, the average buyer goes into the store and he wants to spend £500, he doesn't want to spend £1500. And so the problem is, in that price range its vary hard, almost impossible to walk out of PC World with a computer that's capable of playing games. Now, don't get me wrong; you can go to Dell's website and you can configure a computer for less than that that has a decent graphics card in it, but those aren't the configurations that they're pushing on people and you have to know quite a bit about the game business and quite a bit about video cards, graphics and options in your PC to build that. The truth is, you can go to Dell's website, spend $300 -or-$400 more and still get crappy integrated graphics, and the chances that you'll get integrated graphics if you don't know what you're doing are much higher because the majority of the configurations start there.

So that's a real problem. We're selling the largest part of the market computers that aren't capable of playing games, so if they get a game home and they play it and it doesn't work, they're out of gaming - we've lost them completely, 'gaming's left me by' or 'I'll go buy a console'. That's why consoles are doing so well, because 'instead of spending money on an add-on video card that I don't understand how to install anyway, I'll go buy a console'. And that's where the mass consumers are getting their gaming fix, if they're getting it at all. You know, back in the Doom II days any computer was capable of running Doom II; it's software rendering, you just needed a decent CPU. Now you can buy a very expensive, very high-end CPU and still have a computer that's incapable of playing your average, decent action game. That's a problem.

So that's how we're losing customers; we're selling people machines that are completing incapable of playing games. And they don't know how to fix that situation; you can't upgrade a laptop - a lot of people are moving to laptops are their primary computing platform. If you get the wrong one, you're screwed. And I don't know of any laptops in the low-end price-ranges that have anything but integrated graphics in them. Intel's been massively successful at selling these because they sell it all as a bundle and they give you a nice little marketing kick-back too. So you know, there's a lot of competition there, and the OEM say 'well if everyone's going to buy that I might as well too, that's the only way I can compete on price'. It's a really significant problem.

And what do you think the solution is?

Mark Rein: I don't know. The solution is for Intel to spend a few bucks, maybe cut their marketing kick-backs and put a few of those bucks - and I'm not talking about $30, I'm talking about $5 or $10 more cost of goods into each of those graphics chips and make something that's actually competitive. And I don't mean an nVidia 7900 competitive, I mean an nVidia 7400 competitive or ATI X1600 - something that's at least decent, not expensive but decent.

And Intel could do it, because they have the quantities that other people don't have at marketplace, and they're already giving people huge marketing kick-backs. But you know, the problem is they're so successful how do you tell their sales people 'this isn't a successful strategy what we're doing'. It's going to take them to have some leadership that decides 'you know what? If we get people a little interested in graphics, we can send them the higher-end CPUs where our margins are better, we can actually make more money because these guys will get a little interested in graphics and they'll gradually start upgrading.

The problem is, Intel doesn't sell a better graphics chip than the one you get in the cheapest computer, so there's no value to them in selling you an upgraded graphics chip; they're only interested in selling you a higher-end CPU. So that's a problem. Maybe the merger of ATI and AMD will change that because right now AMD is at a fairly-large disadvantage to Intel's Core 2 processor, the new one. It's a great processor, the Core 2 and certainly the fastest ones are faster than any answer AMD has. So maybe they'll win business at the low-end, where a lot of business is and AMD will bundle a good CPU with one of ATI's better low-end GPUs, like the X1600 and a core chipset. And maybe they can do that at a price that competes with Intel and convince the OEMs that 'hey, forget about just CPU performance; that's a terrible way to measure overall performance of your system, lets look at the overall performance'. Because even though AMD may lose the CPU benchmarks by a couple of points, they'll drastically win the GPU benchmarks, giving them an overall advantage. And that's what's important to us; building systems that are balanced. You know, a dual-core CPU with integrated graphics is a complete waste; there's not much point to that other than padding Intel's profit. But a dual-core CPU made into a decent graphics chip; that's a better situation.

So we'll have to wait and see if AMD has the balls to go up against Intel. I'm nervous about that because when you come to trade shows like this you see huge, huge Intel stands and you see a little, small AMD stand. Marketing hasn't exactly been their strong suite, and they really need to get out there and market this kind of thing if they're going to beat Intel. So we'll see. We'll push them as hard as we can and we'll keep pushing Intel, but we need other people to speak up too. We need other people in the industry to acknowledge that this is a problem, I hear it all the time from developers: 'oh you're so right, it's such a problem', you know, Doom 3 probably sold half of what Doom II did for that exact reason and I'll bet you that Half-Life 2 has sold significantly-less than Half-Life 1 again for that exact same reason. People get it home, they try it on their computer and 'oh, Half-Life 1 worked fine on my old computer'. Guess what? Now you need a GPU to have decent experience and most people don't have a good one. So it's a real problem.

There's a lot of buzz going around at the moment with the imminent arrival of Windows Vista. What's your take on Vista?

Mark Rein: Well I think Vista will ultimately be good for games, it's going to get us a lot closer to the hardware, much in the same way you can get significantly more power out of an Xbox than the same piece of parts configured into a PC. And that's partially because Windows wasn't designed for games originally, so one of the things they've done is they now have Direct X powering the desktop, so we have less competition between the GDI layer and Direct X for resources. That's good. On the other hand I'm bitterly disappointed that they're shipping a 32-bit version of Vista; I think that's very short-sighted, I really don't see the point of it. I think they kind of capitulated to Intel; you know Intel was going along really well making 64-bit chips until their original core chips which are 32-bit, and then I think Intel put the squeeze on Microsoft and said 'we're still going to do some 32-bit chips, you've got to do a 32-bit version'.

And I'm also disappointed that the Aero Glass interface isn't the standard interface for Vista. In other words isn't the only interface for Vista; I think that would've helped us a lot in terms of bringing up the bottom of integrated graphics if Microsoft said 'no Intel, we're not going to capitulate to you, you're going to have to make better chips if you want people to run Vista on your machine'. Now I understand they're a business, they're trying to sell as many as they can but I think they had a good opportunity there to move the market forward and you know, they kind of dropped the ball a little on that. But that's just my view, I think there's lots of good things in Vista that will help gaming but I think the biggest thing they could've done was maybe give us 64-bit only.

What do you think about Microsoft's big Games for Windows push? Do you see good things coming for that?

Mark Rein: My fingers are crossed that they're going to basically help fix the marketing problem with games. In the US, you walk into a store, It's almost impossible; the PC games are in the back, they're filed sideways, there's no rhyme or reason to them, the stores don't market them and then they wonder why they don't sell. Best Buy does a pretty good job; they give us front facings and things of that nature, but the specialty shops have almost given up on Windows gaming. They're happy to take the money from it but they're not giving it enough shelf space, they're certainly not pushing it and that's probably because they can't re-sell those games. But hopefully what Microsoft are doing with Games for Windows will get us some more shelf space and get us some front facing and better organisation, better marketing - I'm going to wait to actually see it happen, you know, actually see EB put those shelves and displays in before I actually label it a success. It's certainly a valiant effort and something that's badly needed.

Before we finish up: did Epic ever get that Wii dev kit?

Mark Rein: (laughs) I can't say, I'm under NDA with Nintendo. But I can tell you that we're not doing, internally any development right now on the Wii. The Wii I'm sure is going to be a fantastic machine and sell really well but it's kind of below - it's not Intel integrated graphics but it's pretty far bellow the kind of min-bar of Unreal Engine 3. If you built a PC with that spec it wouldn't really be capable of playing an Unreal Engine 3 games decently. They're aiming at clearly at different audience that what we are. You know, Unreal Engine 3 can't run on Xbox 1 or PS2 either - and that's not to say that some of our licensees wont find a way to shoe-horn it into that platform, we certainly have some licensees that are doing some experiments in that area and it could very well happen. But that's a really tough job. And one thing that has become public knowledge in the last little while is that Ubisoft's game Red Steel is using Unreal Engine 2, so there will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii. There will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii and hopefully they'll be successful and maybe we'll make a little money from it, but Unreal Engine 3 - that's a little below our target platform.

Do you think the Wii will be able to emulate the success of the DS?

Mark Rein: They certainly have a lot of buzz right now and if they can have a low enough price (NOTE: our interview was conducted before Nintendo's recent price announcement)- you know, people compare the DS and the PSP but the DS is half the price of the PSP, It's going for a different market than the PSP almost and so maybe that's the difference between Wii and PlayStation 3 or Wii and Xbox 360. Maybe they're going to come out at a significantly lower price point and they'll be able to do some really cool stuff with it, we'll have to wait and see. Or wait and Wii (laughs).

Andy Robinson

Featured Comments

Posted by michaelarran@aol
Cut your cloth according to your means, then Mark!

Even with integrated graphics PCs can run some great games, if you are not so greedy with your engines' demands. Market research will tell you the sweetspot to aim for, then you can adjust to fit, rather than complain that the world won't move to fit what you (and a relatively few, to be honest) want. Worked for Sims.

I've been playing games for the last 20 years, and guess what, the graphics thrust is getting boring. Half-Life 2 was good looking, but I didn't feel it grabbed me as much as the first. I'm having more fun playing Giants!

Anyway, I have pre-ordered a Wii, as that looks to be just what the doctor ordered. I hope Ubisoft make a good job of their new FPSs for the platform, and that will persuade some more people to take a look at a fresh alternative.

Cheers

Mike

Posted by zylex
michaelarran@aol: I read the article and thought the self same thing as you! How anybody INSIDE the industry can say 'our game sold half as many as it could of because PC's in homes couldn't run it!' Hey, how about writing games that WILL Mr Epic, et al?!

In any other business the market follows the customer base. Still tons of VHS recorders in homes, so plenty of companies selling movies on tape and blank tapes. Are they all producing on HD DVD only and then complaining their sales are halved? No. They produce for the market AS IT IS!!!!

The PC gaming market used to do this. As per the statements on Doom II selling twice as many as Doom 3. 10 years ago you did have Wing Commander pushing frontiers, (I blame WC for a lot of the problems of today, because it moved the market to only supporting the hardcore, rather than general gamers) but at the time the vast majority of games were written for CURRENT PC's!

In fact that was the case up until about 1998-99, then all of a sudden it changed to expect gamers to keep up with games. We have been in that mode since, and gaming has declined accordingly.

So Mr Epic and everybody - find out what PC's are getting sold and write games for them! It worked well during the early to mid 90's - the peak of PC gaming! You can have the odd game that pushes the environment, but not every single one!

Of course, the media has to change too. Gameplay and entertainment value has to be the key, not how many polygons and new technologies have been utilized!

Let's also not forget that as consoles get more sophisticated how they also get more expensive and also how more is put into the graphics and the technology rather than the gameplay. Do we really think PS2 games were as entertaining (on average) as PS1 games? And certainly with regards X-Box and X-Box 360! Also in the same way it was mentioned that �1,300+ was too high a price for most customers, I can see a lot of people walking away from �500 consoles and �60 games. What will the PS4 and X-Box 720 cost? �700? �800? And the games? �80? �90? And will they have fantastic gameplay, fantastic AI, great stories, value for money? Because that's what gamers want! Or more likely, will they go the PC route and just copy successful games ad neuseam and rely on the graphics and technology but with shallow gameplay?

If things carry on the way they are going, not only are we in the last months of PC gaming, but we may be in the last 2-3 years of a mass console market, and 4-5 years from just a niche console/gaming market all around with an even larger retro market.

As a PS. The Unreal engine and cost benefit of using it is part of the reason we get similar games with just slight variations. In the 90's you got a flight sim, a racing sim, a sub sim, a graphic adventure, a wargame and a platform game. Now we will get 5 different type of Sci-Fi shooters. In the 90's games, you might have bought 2 or 3 of the those games, but generally, you'll only buy the best one of those 5 similar sci-fi shooters. So variation of genres and gaming is also a key point.

As a second PS. Because of all the above, I really do hope the Wii is a success, as it will tell the market that you don't need to write for the highest technology to be successful. It might also change the gaming media too, which is the other half of the reason we have a declining market.

Posted by Aircool_212
Agreed, Agreed. I've got a high end PC, but that doesn't guarantee that the top spec games are good to play. I'm sick and tired of the more power/more GFX situation as well. Half the time, there's not point in all the GFX thrills either as most people have an 'average' PC that will run most modern games on medium settings if they're lucky. Talking of which, I played CoD2 online a lot (until every bugger starting hacking) but used the DirextX 7 setting for a nice fast framerate. You know what, that's just fine by me, the GFX were fine because the gameplay was just so good.

As for the Unreal II Engine being able to run on the Wii. That's great news. The Wii is my console of choice because it will be focussed on gameplay vice GFX overload. Also, the Unreal II Engine produces great GFX as far as I'm concerned, there is no actual need for improvement on it's presentation.

If devs seem to think that 'realistic' environments are as big a step forward as 3D (yes, some idiot Dev or CEO said that, what shortsightedness) then how come LEGO Star Wars II has shifted over one million units in such a short time? It's only a cheesy platformer, but as someone who owns a copy I can honestly say it's one of the best games I've played for a long time.

Also, ask any Football Manager addict (like me) if GFX are important in that game? Answer, piss off! It's the enormous depth of gameplay that makes that game and the top down 2D match engine is the best way to present the gameplay. If it were isometric 2D or pure 3D, people would still go to 2D top down mode because it's the easiest to understand the gameplay.

I don't care for the PS3 one bit. As for the 360, I've been tempted by it's shiny GFX (I'll admit) but I know fine well that the games will just be prettier version of the same shit that came out for the Xbox.

I'm quite happy for the gaming technology to stop right now and slow right down, it's getting stupidly expensive for the devs and the end user (us gamers) that no one can afford to buy the flippin games and the hardware needed.

For the PC, I'm hoping the small indie teams will get back into the fight, after all, I think Microsoft has been quite prophetic in releasing a set of game building tools for free!

I think Vista may actually become a great leveller, with it's scaling of how powerful your PC is (1-5 I think) and all Vista games requiring the power needed to play the game, a lot of devs are suddenly going to find units not shifting because (suprise, suprise) only a few people have a PC capable of running the game. Unless of course they do the minimum specs trick with the numbering system and put a rating in which the game will run, but be far from playable. In which case, us lucky Europeans will be laughing all the way to a tribunal. Or at least getting our money back for the game.

As for all this next-gen console malarky, the term next-gen has come to mean some giant leap in gameplay vice just a new range of consoles being released. As for that competition, well, the 360 and PS3 may sell, but most true gamers know that all the real fun and games is going to be on the Wii.

The Wii. Sure it's cheap technology compared to the 360 and PS3, but the GFX will be just fine and it comes packed with a few features not available on the more expensive consoles. It uses Wi-fi for a start so no cabling problems their, you can use it with any TV in the house. Want to do that with the 360, that's �70 please for the wi-fi connector; almost half the price of the whole Wii console!!! How about games? �50 for a 360 game (and worse for the PS3 I expect). Piss off! I'll stick to my �30 PC games or �35 Wii games.

Blu-Ray, HD-DVD (or whatever it's called). Pah! We've only just got to the stage where most households have a DVD player, and that format isn't going anywhere for a long while. Heheh, just look at the pointless UMD. I've got a PSP, but six months later I bought DS; miles better and much cheaper.

I don't care about numbers of consoles sold, I don't care about polygon counts and triple multiple dogs bollocks shading...

I just want to play fun games

Thankyou Nintendo for understanding this simple statement.

The rest of you can (and will) dissappear up your own bum mapped arses!

Grand Moff Aircool

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