Microsoft's next-gen silence at this week's Game Developers Conference has been dismissed as "more perception than reality," by Epic Games co-founder Mark Rein.

PlayStation 4 has been an ever-present discussion point at the San Francisco event, with Sony publicly fostering developer relations and even showcasing controllers at its booth.
However, Rein said that assumptions Microsoft didn't have a private presence at the conference "isn't true," and that on the public side it's simply a case of one platform holder having announced their new console and the other not.

"I think that's more perception than reality," Rein said of Microsoft's suggested absence from GDC.

"Microsoft has always been very developer centric with all of their platforms and that Sony is embracing that approach is wonderful. But I don't think it diminishes what Microsoft is doing.

"I don't think with developer relations anyone is trying to be public, it's just you're at GDC and Sony has the hardware to talk about, and Microsoft hasn't talked about it publicly yet. So I think it's just the difference between someone who can say the name of their console and someone who can't."

On the PS4 side Epic released an extended video of its Unreal Engine 4 'Elemental' demo running on the console.

Rein had plenty of positive things to say about Sony's open approach to developer relations:

"It's abundantly clear that PS4 is being driven as a collaboration between East and West, as opposed to a dictation from one side to the other," he said. "Developers are fully involved, activated, discussed and doing really cool collaborative things."