We mentioned a while back that Epic were developing a number of new games aside from the Gears franchise, and we couldn’t help hoping against hope that perhaps one of them might be Unreal 3. Not so, says Mike Capps. Talking to businesslication Forbes the Epic bossman said: “Unreal and Unreal Tournament continue to have a huge influence on the studio here, even though we’re not currently working on an Unreal IP project.” It’s not the first time that Capps has mentioned the U-word recently, but it’s the first indication that they’re not actually doing anything with it.

Writing in a blogpost on PC gaming journal Rock, Paper, Shotgun Jim Rossignol said “Aww, that’s a shame. But perhaps they are working on something exciting and new! That would be exciting. And new.”

Eurogamer have a brief and mysterious news story sourced from Mike Capps of Epic Games who was speaking at Gamescom/GDCE today. Epic are apparently working on five new games, none of them Gears Of War related. Could one of them be Samaritan? Probably not, as it sounds like these are small-scale projects. Anyway, here’s the important bit:

“It’s nice to target the PC as a primary platform again,” teased Capps, “not just for ports.”

Alec sighs and points at Blues News who points at The Sixth Axis who points at Edge magazine who points at Epic President Mike Capps in an interview situation who points at Piracy for Epic’s pointing away from the PC. He says things like “We still do PC, we still love the PC, but we already saw the impact of piracy: it killed a lot of great independent developers and completely changed our business model.” and “So, maybe Facebook will save PC gaming… but it’s not going to look like Gears of War.”. More here. I’m sure everyone agrees, so I’m tempted to just close the comments thread because there’s nothing to say, but maybe I’m wrong.