Unreal Buys Reality

Strange as that sounds, it's true ... Epic Games bought out the Reality Engine and hired the programmer of that engine, Tim Johnson.

Interesting. The RE was fairly unknown though apparently somewhat technically impressive. It might have given smaller companies (for instance, the makers of the Unreal mod Frag.Ops had moved to it, will now have to pony up for Unreal at a "discounted price") more options.

I love the guys over at Epic, but are they becoming the Microsoft of middleware engines?