Epic Games Vice-President Mark Rein likes to talk to people, and when he does, things often slip out. This was exactly the case during his recent appearance on Spike TV’s Game Head with Geoff Keighley. In speaking about the somewhat surprising announcement that Gears of War would be coming to Windows much faster than anyone expected (and to XP as well), Rein also slipped in an even bigger surprise: Gears is coming to Macs as well, and so is Unreal Tournament 3:

In the interview, after Keighley asked Rein if he had any misgivings about Epic’s decision to bring that game to Sony’s PlayStation 3, a competing platform, Rein emphasized Epic’s position as an independent developer of game technology. The company first showed Unreal Engine 3 running a PlayStation 3 development console in 2005, long before the console was available to the public.

Rein then added, “Don’t forget, we’re also doing Macintosh.”

“Gears of War is coming to the Mac?” asked Keighley.

“Yes, Gears is going to come to the Mac and so is UT,” said Rein, referring to Unreal Tournament 3.

This is interesting on a few levels. First, one of the sort of journalism memes going around since Gears was hinted at for PC is that though the game might not be solely on the 360, it was still “exclusive to Microsoft platforms”, which is pretty obviously not the case. Second, I think the migration of Gears to Mac could well speak to Epic’s battles with Microsoft about the right to give away content, as well as Live for Windows and its growing pains. Third, Microsoft’s hold on Gears as publisher and partial rights holder is not as tight as a lot of people thought. It does sort of add a bit of credence to the theories floating around about Gears of War side stories popping up on other consoles. Well Microsoft? What’s your move? I hope it involves the words “free content” and “open platform”.

-Aegies

While there were some non-gaming related reveals at Steve Job’s keynote at the WWDC this morning, EA and iD definitely seem to have spring the biggest surprises on the audience. First, EA has committed full platform support for Macs (presumably Intel macs though, I’d imagine).

Now, this makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, there are more Macs out there right now that are completely gaming capable than 360s, PS3s, or Wiis, possibly combined. It’s a big market, and ignoring it until this point has been a bit backwards, and a bit rooted in the previous architecture differences that separated the PC and the Mac. With that gone, there’s little reason to not embrace the platform.

There’s another possible reason though; Games for Windows. EA has demonstrated hesitance in accepting any outside standards and requirements for their games on Microsoft’s platforms in the past. One of the biggest hurdles of Live on the original Xbox was EA’s refusal to play ball on Microsoft servers, and therefore Xbox Live. On the PC side of things, rather than embrace the Games for Windows branding initiative for their titles, EA has created their own brand identity for the PC side in direct marketing competition with Games for Windows. EA has demonstrated an interest in maintaining absolute control over the games they publish (possibly because of the demographic and marketing information that they’ve taken to collecting through their clients for games like Battlefield 2142, or the marketing they send to players who access their games through Xbox Live), and increased adoption of Games for Windows in the PC space could threaten their ability to leverage their games for their own purposes. Making the Mac an acceptable, viable gaming platform is disruptive enough to distract and possibly even derail Games for Windows. Is that likely to happen? I would say not. But Microsoft should certainly be worried. And they should counter this by making Games for Windows less crap, which I say as a de facto subscriber to the service, since I pay for Live Gold on the 360.

That in mind, there’s also iD announcing that their next, as of now unnamed project will release on the Mac as well, and to boot, they debuted the engine today during Jobs’ keynote. The details of the engine are still scarce, but the images that have popped up are fairly impressive. This development may be from factors similar to EA’s possible motivations, and ironically from Carmack’s focus on the 360 as his lead platform for their new IP. Carmack has gone on record criticizing Vista and DirectX 10 already, so this may be his way of asserting iD’s own independence from Windows. Development on the 360 has also freed them from Windows in some ways as well.

So, all around, this is great news for gamers. The Mac looks like it may become much more of a viable platform for games, and Microsoft now has much more incentive to improve the shaky infrastructure its built for Games for Windows. As we’ve maintained around here on repeated occasions, Competition is Good amidst gaming platforms.

-Aegies