Next Generation Consoles Need to Provide a Big Leap Forward, Epic Says

Epic Games’ technical head, Tim Sweeney, believes that next generation consoles, like the often rumored PlayStation 4 or Xbox 720, need to provide a huge and fundamentally new experience before actually appearing on the market.

Current consoles have been around for quite some time now, with both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 selling tens of millions of units all over the world. Now, as sales have begun to slow down, quite a lot of people are talking about their successors, like the PlayStation 4 or Xbox 720.

According to Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney, however, neither Sony nor Microsoft need to hurry, as next generation devices need to deliver a big leap forward in terms of quality if they want to impress actual gamers.

"We have been able to ship three Gears of War games on the same generation of hardware, each one with dramatic improvements over the last and a two to three-year development cycle," he told Venture Beat. "So it's been a very good thing for a game business today. With each new title, there is a bigger and bigger Xbox 360 installed base of users, so the games can sell more.

"On the other hand, it gets harder to generate the same excitement from the same hardware. That is when the new hardware is justified. But then you reset the installed base to zero and it's a lot harder to sell a lot of games again. So you should only replace the hardware when you can make a dramatic leap in quality, not just 2X or 3X. It has to be huge and fundamentally new."

Sweeney also mentioned that hardware manufacturers need to listen to developers, highlighting how Epic managed to convince Microsoft to put more RAM in the Xbox 360, a decision that cost the company around $1 billion.

"They put in extra memory and that is one of the reasons we were able to make Gears of War look so compelling," he explained. "Without that extra memory, we would have far less space for details. That decision cost Microsoft about $1 billion, but you can say that it paid off big time. They would not have succeeded to the extent they have today if they had not done that."

Sweeney already talked about Epic’s next version of the Unreal Engine, saying that it might appear sometime in 2014, so perhaps we’ll get to see the PS4 or Xbox 720 at that point in time.