It seems that Epic recently dropping licenses left and right hasn’t affected the sales of Unreal Tournament 3 (over a million sold-through, apparently) nor its future. In the words of Epic‘s Mark Rein (the guy who’s blaming piracy for everything):

Our arrangement with Midway isn’t a license but rather a straight publishing agreement and Midway is still very much the publisher of Unreal Tournament 3. In fact, we’re working together on a major expansion to Unreal Tournament 3, that we expect will excite and grow our UT3 customer base which incidentally, now numbers over a million units sold-through world-wide.

The fun thing about this is that all of BeyondUnreal, Joystiq and Eurogamer claim that it was them who asked Mark Rein, and them who got this answer. Now either they all got exactly the same answer at the same time, or two of the three are full of bull. Certainly wouldn’t surprise me with Joystiq, and not all too much with Eurogamer either. Anyway.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to the expansion. If it does anything (new voting systems, forced rotations, whatever) to remedy the problem that the sole played VCTF map is Suspense, and the only oft-played DM maps are Deck and Biohazard, I’m a happy fragger. As unlike so many others, I actually liked the gameplay, and got used to the UI…