GameIndustry International reported in a Montreal International Game Summit’s keynote address today, Epic Games chief technology officer Tim Sweeney expects Epic to be able to build next-gen titles for “only about double the cost” of games from the start of the current generation.”
“It could be worse.”
Sweeney then talked about “Epic’s first next-gen tech demo, a 2011 clip called Samaritan that showed off Direct X 11 technology in a modified version of Unreal Engine 3.” While Sweeney said Epic was enthusiastic about the results, the company was “greatly worried” about the cost and logistics as the clip was just under three minutes in length and took four months and 30 people to create. “If we extrapolate that into creating an entire game, we were worried that the cost would go up by a factor of three or four or even five in the next generation. And of course, we felt that was not acceptable.”
The increase in research and technology is growing exponentially according to Ray Kurtzweil’s film, Transcendant Man, and one has to ponder the effect this exponential growth will have on societies, economies, etc.. Are governments and companies and consumers ready for this type of growth and at what cost with substandard education and an ill-literate society?
This is big news for the Video Game Industry. If this is true, there could be another video game crash, like when video games transitioned from arcades to Magnavoxes to Nintendo.
Sweeney also discussed defragmenting- cross platforming of video games and the ease of that transition in video games nowadays.
There really seems to be a looming trend towards free to play.