By Luke Plunkett, 8:20 AM on Mon Apr 9 2007, 3,582 views (Edit post, Set to draft, Slurp)

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If you listened to last week's 1UP Yours podcast, you'd have heard Epic's Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein say some pretty average things about Games for Windows Live. Which was very interesting. Pity that was overshadowed by a ton of people howling and wailing over some comments they made about the cost of new Gears maps.

It boils down to the pair saying they'd wanted to release new Gears maps for a while (and have FOUR good to go), and had wanted to do so for free, but Microsoft had other plans, instead having them charge for them. Sucks, yeah, but we already knew that's how they roll.

Mark Rein hit the Gears forums yesterday to calm people:

Epic thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to give the maps away for free and Microsoft thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to sell the maps. So what we've agreed to do is to put these maps on sale at a reasonable price then make them free a few months later.