Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney has recently stated in an interview with Eurogamer that he’s quite happy with the upcoming upgraded Xbox One and PS4.
“I’m absolutely thrilled with this,” Sweeney stated. “It gives you the best of both worlds, the upgrade cycle of the PC which ensures that people always have access to the latest and greatest hardware and games don’t go out of date over a seven year cycle, together with the fact there’s a box you can go and buy – or two boxes – and you’re guaranteed that everything can work. And I think the configurations for developers are very reasonable.”
Part of this excitement, Sweeney states, comes from the upgraded console’s ability to not refresh the userbase, but allowing those with older consoles to still play the same games.
“From an industry insider perspective, the console industry will grow and sustain its user base much better if it doesn’t have to reset its user base to zero every seven years. The idea of throwing everything out and doing everything from scratch every seven years is completely crazy. And everything Epic’s done with our new game development approach, involving these online games we’re going to maintain over time, it’s about building games where we don’t have to reset our user base to zero when we want to add new features.”
The upgraded consoles, he believes, will allow developers to better create games for the 4K market, something that Sweeney believes is becoming cheaper to produce.
“There’s value to 4K,” said Sweeney. “These 4K television are incredibly high quality and becoming very economical so supporting them will be good. From a typical users TV, a lot of users are going to prefer having that 3 to 4 times the computing power applied towards making the existing number of pixels look that much better. I think games will choose different routes. At any rate every game should be expected to deliver a 3X or better improvement in graphics quality as a result of this new hardware – whether they do it through higher resolution or prettier pixels is a decision for each game, and different games will exploit it in different ways.”
Do you agree with Tim Sweeney? Are you excited for the upgraded consoles, or bummed that you’ll be stuck with the older versions while those jumping in later to this generation get the better end of the stick? Sound off in the comments!