Major Nelson在他最近的Blogcast中访问了CliffyB(GOW制作人)，访问中提到一件有趣的事：是Epic帮玩家们争取到现在这台有512MB记忆体的360。微软原先只想让360有256MB记忆体。Epic 打电话给微软，并展示了只用256MB记忆体的 Gears of War 给他们看。接着微软公布了 XBOX360 的最终硬体规格：一部有512MB记忆体的XBOX360。Epic于是成为第一家依360的最终硬体规格开发游戏的公司。

当天稍晚，微软的一位财务主管打电话给 Epic：“你们刚(多)花了我十亿美金。”
Epic 的 Mark Rein 回他：“不，我们刚刚帮了十亿玩家一个大忙。”

http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/12 ... -a-Billion-Dollars/

Microsoft to Epic: You Cost Me a Billion Dollars
By: César A. Berardini - "Cesar"
Oct. 23rd, 2006 11:27 am

In his latest podcast, Major Nelson included a Q&A session with Mark Rein, recorded at the Canadian Community Party. During the session, the VP of Epic Games revealed that Gears of War played a key role in convincing Microsoft the Xbox 360 needed 512 MB of system memory instead of the 256 megs originally projected.

"The interesting thing is that story you all heard about us costing Microsoft a billion dollars… that’s actually true," Rein explained to a laughing crowd.

"So what happened was, my partner Tim Sweeney, we kept arguing and arguing like, we really wanted a hard drive in every single machine; that was something we really wanted but we realized that the 512 megs of RAM was way more important, cause otherwise you couldn’t do this level of graphics if you had to both write your program and do your graphics in 256 megs. Nothing would really look that HD."

"So we argued, and argued, and what Tim did is he actually sent a screenshot of what Gears of War would look like if we only had 256 megs of memory. So the day they made the decision, we were apparently the first developed they called; we were at Game Developers Conference, was it two years ago, and then I got a call from the Chief Financial Officer of MGS and he said 'I just want you to know you cost me a billion dollars' and I said, 'we did a favor for a billion gamers'."

http://www.tgfcer.com/club/thread-5812226-1-1.html