14 DAY TRIAL // Video game developer and technology creator Epic Games says that most of the teams that are using the new Unreal Engine 4 are aiming to launch their titles in the first quarter of 2015, with official announcements and feature reveals set to take place later this year.
Mike Gamble, who is managing the European business for the company, says that he cannot disclose any information about the projects because that would break the trust between his company and those who license their product.
He tells CVG that most of the coming titles are designed to use entirely new universes and that, “If not 70/30 in favour of new stuff. There’s a lot of buffering. A lot of studios are doing a franchise iteration and a new IP.”
Gamble adds, “It’ll happen this year, toward the Christmas period. Knowing the games that are in development, there are some crackers. The first quarter of 2015 is also where a lot of them seem to be aiming. This year there seems to be a lot of cross-gen, but that’s publishers and developers being safe, isn’t it? It’s still a good revenue stream.”
Unreal Engine 4 is designed to use all the extra computing power offered by the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox One from Microsoft, while also keeping up with the constantly advancing hardware on the PC.
Epic Games has released a number of demos and videos based on its new technology and is also working on its own title that uses it, called Fortnite, which will be offered in 2014.
Recently, Microsoft has announced that it is acquiring the Gears of War franchise from the studio and that Black Tusk studio will be in charge of creating an entirely new title set in the universe, although no details about it are offered at the moment.