I think it would be smart for Microsoft to lock Epic into a multi-game exclusivity deal (say the next 3 games they make in addition to Gears of War 2).

Multigame exclusivity to what Legend? The 360? They won't do that, because they are still trying to plug the horrible Windows Live.  Though you would think they would give up on that eventually, they are surprisingly stubborn. Thankfully, Epic dislikes Windows Live, and has only allowed Gears to be published for it because they don't have publishing rights for it. Their other games on PC will remain unattached to the awful system according to the developers. If Microsoft really cared about PC gaming they would stop thinking with their wallets and support Steam.

You have got to be kidding me.
" We don't know what they are exactly but if you sell 80,000 a month for 10 months that's a multi-million seller "

Nobody else reacted on the fact that he said 80K*10 = 2M+?

Gears of War 2 will likely make more money on 360 for them than any of their recent PC games.  As for Steam I can't wait for them to start posting sales numbers on it because it's getting tiring hearing how that's where all the PCs sales went to.  If they're selling millions of copies of games for everyone why are they keeping sales numbers so secret?  I suspect it mirrors the NPD's PC charts but with Valve having the lion's share of sales instead of Blizzard and EA and everyone else getting small pieces.

Somebody already mentioned it.  Anyways, it could make sense considering they were talking about NPD numbers, and he said multi million seller worldwide.  Either a poor choice of words, or Rein is bad at math.

 Actually naz if Activision is in on this then so is Blizzard technically since they merged right?

^ Yeah they formed Blizzard Activision, which can mean that Blizzard will try breaking into the console market and effectively ruining the quality of their games for the PC even if they are considered amazing on the console.

Any game that is not developed exclusively for the PC will probably mess up the the PC version of the game. The only exception for this is BioShock but it was never intended to be a 360 game up until close to launch. There are very good reasons why the Halo games have been sucking on the PC. They are a very mediocre games which only shine because they got the controls to the FPS genre right on a controller and enabled multiplayer. UT3 is another example of what happens when a game is not developed solely with the PC in mind. It just plain sucked on the PC, weapons were consolified as was the UI. And as any veteran UT player knows the feel of the weapons is more or less the number one component carrying the game.

Frankly I don't wanna see any other half-assed PC games coming out of Epic since I still wanna like them for the previous UTs. That said, I agree with Naz on the Windows Live games. It just needs to stop, it's churning out the worst multiplayer in games i've seen in a LONG time.

Gears of War 2 will make them very little money, because they don't own the Gears license, Microsoft does. Epic didn't make Gears, they were paid to make Gears. Same with Gears 2. They have very little control over the license, nor do they directly benefit from the sales. Microsoft pays for it, and Microsoft gets the profits. It also has nothing to do with Epic's PC development teams. What Epic has been making money off of is licensing the Unreal Engine. Far more than their games.

Steam isn't going to start posting sales numbers. Steam just tracks sales for the publishers in real time now. That's what Steamworks does. So every publisher knows exactly how much their game has sold at every moment. The beauty of Steam is that a game doesn't have to sell millions upon millions to make money. Because it eliminated the retail markups, the developer gets about 70% of the retail sales instead of about 30%.

I doubt Steam even comes close to mimmicking NPD since the majority of Steam users aren't from North America. North America is far from the largest PC market. Even small countries like Germany are larger PC markets, and Europe and Korea are far more important. I know it's hard for some people to understand that America isn't the end all be all of everything gaming, but it's true.

Also, I forgot about Activision and Blizzard merging. That's a good point. It's also interesting though... Activision started supporting Steam. Does that mean we'll see Starcraft 2 on Steam? That would be really cool.