In what has become a sort of tradition, Epic's Tim Sweeney made a post to the Unreal Technology Page, directly rebutting statements made earlier today by Monolith's Jason Hall (story). Specifically Tim addresses the accusation that they are neglecting their licensees, and he repeatedly points to the success of Unreal as a game as an example of their model working. Here's an excerpt which sums up Tim's position nicely:

Our engine licensing business has always been driven simply by people seeing our games and tools and saying, "Wow, that's exactly the kind of engine I need!" All our early licensing success, with Legend Entertainment and Microprose, occurred before we realized that a viable business called "engine licensing" even existed. The Unreal community online developed the same way -- we never said "let's recruit web sites for our game", we just released a cool game (early on, just cool screenshots), and the community happened. Our philosophy is "Build it, and they will come".