"Epic's VP on UT 2007, next generation pricing, second hand games and the key challenges facing next-gen developers...

You'll probably remember the Leipzig Games Show, when Epic Games ever-ebullient Vice President Mark Rein revealed the existence of Unreal Engine 4 to a salivating world, which we broke in our exclusive news story here.

It was an intriguing interview but possibly the most shocking revelation of all was the fact that the Unreal Engine 4 has been in development for over two years. Not content with ruling the next-gen, it seemed Epic were already targeting the next next-gen as well.

But that wasn't the only thing Rein had to say on that day and now, after nearly a month on and off the road, we've finally managed to catch up with transcribing the full interview.

Why developers hate second hand games, the perils and pitfalls of next generation pricing, the possible death of retail and the future of Epic's next-gen titles themselves - all come under discussion and you'll find the ever quotable Rein has plenty of opinions on all of these topics and quite a few others. Enjoy.

How are things over at Epic right now?

Mark Rein: Well we're growing like crazy. We need people, you need to work at Epic! Currently we've got 14 positions available, and that's only the ones we're advertising for. If somebody great came to us and they're really fantastic, we'd still hire them. We announced lots of great guys are using Unreal Engine 3: NCSoft, Namco and a few others have come forward.

The technology is coming along really well. We did the deal with Sony for instance. If people want to work in games and not work in a stuffy office for a big corporation, if they want to work in games either on the games side, or the technology side and they want to make industry-leading money and work with the best people, they really need to send us their resume.

It's front page news because of the deals we've done with MS & Sony. Gears of War is looking fantastic. We're showing off some new stuff at the Tokyo Game Show to help Microsoft in the Japanese market. It's the kind of game that could really appeal to the Japanese, so we'll have a little stop gap demo, we'll have a massive show at X05. That's what we're really aiming for." [more]