Rein defends Unreal against claims of poor support

Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has defended Unreal Engine 3 support against claims made by Silicon Knights, saying: "We deliver fantastic support. You just need to talk to our licensees."

Speaking at GCDC this week, Dyack had said that he was confident "justice would be done" when his company's case against Epic was heard.

And while Rein would not be drawn on the nature of Dyack's concerns, he told our sister site Eurogamer that Unreal support not only offered direct access to the people who worked on individual engine features, but also offered complete access to the combined knowledge of all the engine's existing licensees.

"The quality of our support is very much how much you use it and how much you put into it," Rein told Eurogamer in an interview published today. "I don't believe anybody delivers better support than us, and, when you have a question about our engine, it's answered by the guy who made that particular thing in the engine."

"We really do a good job on support, and I think if you talk to some of our customers, you talk to Midway, you talk to Gearbox and some of these other guys, I think they'll tell you that our support is very good."

Rein pointed to unsolicited public testimonials from the likes of Brothers In Arms developer Gearbox Software to support his defence, adding that the engine evaluation programme Epic offers to potential licensees is fully featured and flexible enough to give developers a clear picture of whether they are looking in the right place.

"Nobody's forced to license our engine, and you see a lot of people do, and they are having a good time and they are making good games," he said.

Told that this begged the question "what is Denis's problem?", Rein admitted: "I don't have anything brilliant to add to that."

The case, and Epic's counter-suit, have yet to be heard.