Epic: Xbox 360 services are "slowly creeping up" to next gen features

The next generation is already here! It prowls amongst us like the Invisible Man infiltrating a women's hockey team locker room, blowing on the backs of our necks and stealing our underwear. Thus the Epic Games diagnosis, at least. It's all about those online services, you see. They portend.

"If you were asking me to make a little crystal ball prediction, I think you're already seeing the console manufacturers making leaps and bounds in the services they provide on the console," the company's vice-president Mark Rein told the fine folk of Videogamer at Develop yesterday.

"For example, you've seen Sony make lots of improvements," he went on. "They added lots of new entertainment related things and new features to the XMB; cloud services and things like that. Same thing with Microsoft: they now have cloud saves and Hulu and that awesome NBA stuff they showed.

"They're just layering and layering on really cool services already, so I think that you will see a big improvement in services.

"The new consoles will do something even more profound with that than they do today. I think you're seeing them getting ready for that, slowly creeping up a little bit to a point that when they get hardware that has new capabilities they will take advantage of them. And then I also think we will get a big bump in graphics capability and memory and the things that we need to push our games forward."

He added that Epic is content to wait for the most powerful hardware possible, echoing Cliff Bleszinski among others. For all its high end Unreal Engine 4 demos, the Gears household is fine with long console generations providing the eventual hardware bump is a sizeable one indeed.

"We're very happy with the state of the console business with Xbox 360," Rein insisted. "We've made successful games on it. Gears of War 3 did extremely well as you saw and Gears of War: Judgment is fantastic.

"So I don't really have anything negative to say about what they've done [with prolonging the console cycle]. We're grateful to have Xbox 360, and we're grateful that they supported it so well and created so much cool innovation on it so late in its life-cycle. We're happy with Xbox 360." Unlike Square Enix, then.

Expanded online features are among next gen's surer bets. You've got analysts claiming that Xbox 720 is likely to support cloud gaming, while recent Rare hirings point to a surge in free-to-play games. Epic is bang up for all this - the company's tech whiz Tim Sweeney says Western disc-based business models are "far, far behind" Asia's digital-centric approach.

True story: Rein once trolled an interview of mine at Develop, bursting out laughing at one of my questions and obliging me to briefly channel Sergeant Apone. You secure that shizzle, Rein! Come here, little man - come here.