Epic's Mike Capps

Yes. So it's disappointing that we haven't seen more of that, but it wasn't a massive community modding on the PS3 for us. Maybe at the end of the day it's because it wasn't a giant-seller on the PS3 for us - it maybe did half a million or a million units - but we'll see. I'd love to see UDK on Xbox or PS3, that'd be fantastic. I'd love to get those guys convinced that it makes sense for them. XNA sort of does that...

That's a great question... you'd have to ask them. Microsoft loves the closed network because it solves a lot of problems. They don't have to worry about somebody posting content that they don't want up there - but that doesn't mean you can't use your Project Gotham Racing car creator to write something with bullet holes on the side of your car that's quite offensive... so as soon as you have user-created content, you have to deal with all that.

Yeah - it's not hard to make up a leet-speak curse-word that doesn't get caught by the system. But as soon as you allow anybody to do anything, you're taking that risk.

Exactly - you'd never, ever put S-U-X as your name in there... would you? [smiles] Wow, that brought be back.

So I think that's the big one - user-created content has a lot of risks from a publicity perspective. Microsoft is trying to reinvent themselves this Holiday as a family-friendly console, right? So the last thing you want is a giant news story about the Giant Penis Theory, at the same time they're trying to watch Natal.

It's just unfortunate that the way the media might - would - jump on something like that, and the way that people would be whipped into a hysteria, thinking: "What? My children are playing on a porn platform?" Fox probably [would do that]. And then they're sunk, which would be terrible, because anybody with half a brain would say: "Well, have you been on the internet?"

You mean, if we're missing out on the diamond-shovelling operations over there? We do think about it, but what we think about is how we leverage that userbase into the games that we do. How do we find a way for people who are playing Gears to have a Gears experience outside of the game.

Because they're Gears-heads, but they're Xbox is back at home, they're stuck in Vegas, miserable, with no ability to do anything Gears... how do I level up, or sharpen my chainsaw, or how does my mum do it?

Say my mum plays Gears, and she understands it, but she worries about the life on Serra and the Hammer of Dawn or whatever, and she'd playing an ecological game on Facebook... that'd be great.

Yeah, exactly. But at the end of the day we make Gears, and games like that, and Shadow Complex, and we'll continue to. We'll look at ways to make it more relevant, but I don't want Twitter feeds coming out of Uncharted 2 every 30 seconds saying: "Hey, gosh, Mike just killed another Berserker..."

We're not a me-too company, right?

There's a lot of times when I'd have liked to play a World of Warcraft-type game when I'm flying or without a network, so I want to be doing something.

You're not going to watch a movie just to have a Twitter feed while you're watching it... although I do know people who, in a conversation of three people, will just sit there and one of them will be tweeting: "I'm sitting here, talking to Mike..." For those people... I worry for them...

But from our perspective there's a tonne of interest in the iPhone, so we did a skunkworks tech demo to show that actually our stuff works pretty well on the 3GS, it looks good.

It's not a plan for us, we're not diving into iPhone development, but I wanted all our licensees to know that, hey, if they're making a Medal of Honor game and you were going to make an iPhone game anyway, it's not that hard... here are the tricks we did to make that work.

So it's more about that, rather than saying: "Let's get out of this triple-A business and dump that, not at all."