Epic's Mark Rein

We're over 250,000 installs on UDK now.

I don't know. That's the beauty of UDK - people can go take it and do whatever they want with it. We have a great business model, lots of people coming to get a license, but the truth is you don't need to come and get a license until you decide that you want to make a game commercially.

If you want to make it non-commercially, you've already signed the license when you click through the installer. So it's hard to get a feel for the size of the market, but we do encourage people to come to our community forums and show off what they've made, and there is a ton of amazing stuff.

Absolutely. And that's what I was trying to address in the talk [at GameHorizon] - distribution without marketing is just distribution. You have to have marketing, you have to have a conversation with the customers.

I don't know - I don't think you have to place a bet right now. I certainly wouldn't bet Microsoft out either. Right now we're not terribly interested in Windows Mobile 7 because it doesn't allow native code to run, which means it's a proprietary platform for all intents and purposes. I think they're going to change that - they haven't even released that platform yet.

I mean, they know that if they want to get a plethora of great apps they're going to have to do something, and people don't really want to develop for managed code environments. And so I wouldn't count them out. They've got a lot of money. Marketing is hugely important. Microsoft could easily take some of that cash wad and spread it around the carriers, and the carriers do the majority of the advertising for these mobile platforms, so if the carriers get behind it could easily be as big as Android and IOS - so it's a just a question of what Microsoft wants to do.

It's inevitable, because once the genie's out of the bottle, it's out. You can't un-shoot a gun, right? Once people get a taste a something higher quality, they can't go back. You're not watching a lot of black and white, 4:3 television at home, are you? Sure there's some nostalgia factor there, but for the most part people aren't going back and playing 20 year-old games because the technology surpasses them and now they have much better experiences that are more immersive.

And once you have a taste of immersion, your suspension of disbelief that you had before when you had clunky 16 bit pixels on the screen, it goes away. You just don't go back and watch silent movies in black and white. I'm not saying there's no market for that, but it's not mainstream.

But they're not. They're still with produced with decent cameras... Actually most of the videos I watch on YouTube are in HD. The only reason you watch a video on YouTube that isn't in HD is because you want to watch it right now, but a lot of things I want to see, especially if it's a game demo, I click HD, and I watch it in HD.

Let's not kid ourselves - these are much higher resolutions than what you used to watch on TV 20 years ago, and you just don't go back. I think it's the same thing with games, it's the same thing with movies. You know, why would they have bothered making Avatar? They had perfectly good technology, users were quite happy... Once you get a certain level of technology, you just can't go back.