Palm appears keen to bolster webOS's gaming presence, with the manufacturer today announcing that it has secured a deal with Epic Games to bring Unreal Engine 3 support to the OS.

The firm made the revelation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the news following the release of the webOS plug-in development kit (PDK) back on Tuesday.

"Unreal Engine 3 powers Epic's popular Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War along with many other titles from leading game developers," said Jon Zilber, Palm's director of online communications, on the company's official blog.

"Licensees of Unreal Engine 3 will soon be able to build games for Palm webOS."

He added, "Together, the PDK and the Unreal Engine 3 will make it even easier for developers to bring visually rich games to Palm webOS phones."

Palm has confirmed that Unreal Engine 3 licensees can download the software for free, the engine already available on Unreal's development kit website.

Palm