14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games believes that it is time for the gaming industry to settle on a smaller number of core platforms rather than spend time and resources creating titles for everything from the new PlayStation Vita to the older Xbox 360 and PC setups.
Talking at the DICE 2012 conference Tim Sweeney, who is the chief executive officer at Epic Games, told the audience that the current gaming world, with its mix of PCs, tablets, consoles, handhelds and smartphones had “too many platforms. Over time these platforms will be whittled down to a competing set of platforms to maybe three winners worldwide across everything – computers, game platforms, smartphones.”
The executive expects a lot of consolidation to take place in the coming years, with some of the competitors getting out of hardware production entirely, in a way similar to how SEGA has already done.
Sweeney added, “I see a bright future for technology and its implications on games. The ability of game developers to exploit another thousand-fold increase in computing power on future generations of platforms. Some of it will be consoles, some of it PC and some of it tablets. The form factor we can’t predict, but the opportunity is there. Our industry’s brightest days are yet to come.”
He also believes that the current devices from Apple, mainly the iPad, can drive gaming forward, mainly because the hardware is progressing very fast and developers have so far only managed to unlock a limited part of the technology’s potential.
At the moment Epic Games is working on the fourth generation of the Unreal Engine and has already released a very impressive tech demo called The Samaritan, which might also become a full game.
The actual engine is expected to arrive only when Sony and Microsoft launch their next generation home consoles, which will probably not happen before 2013.