Epic Games On The Xbox 720

With the ever building noise surrounding the Xbox 360’s eventual successor, even Epic Games, developer behind the Gears Of War series and creator of the Unreal Engine has reached out and had their say in all this.

Founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney stated that they are investing heavily with their engine, as well as game development for the next generation of console technology and games:

“With every console transition, people ask if there will be another console transition or another successful console platform. We are betting big that there will be. If you look at games like Call of Duty and Gears of War, it’s clear that console is the pinnacle of the gaming experience. so we are investing heavily with our engine and game development efforts for the next generation of console technology and games. But at the same time, we actually see this wonderful thing happening where the mobile platform and web platforms are getting to the point where they can run a AAA game. One consistent game engine technology can run across console, PC, mobile and web games. We’re really happy with that position. It lets game developers target lots of different platforms. We have shipped Infinity Blade of iOS. We have announced a new game Fortnite for an entirely different audience, more casual. It appeals to a wider audience than a hardcore game like Gears of War. We are branching out, but we tie it all together with AAA production values.”

Sweeney continues:

“The longevity of this console generation has been a mixed blessing. On the game side, it’s been really great for our business. 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. 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.

If you create awesome technology for the wrong platform, then nobody will ever adopt it. Epic in general has always tried to be really savvy on the business side. We look at the business models and changing trends and try to stay on top of them. If you look at Epic, we began as a shareware game company in the 1990s making really tiny games. Then we pulled together into one huge team and created the first Unreal game. At that point, we needed to build a huge game to compete with the likes of id Software. We changed our company dramatically to do that. Around 2004, we decided the game industry’s sweet spot was moving to consoles. So we made the transition from a PC game company to a console game company with Gears of War. Now we see new changes afoot with the move to mobile and web gaming with Adobe Flash. So we put together business relationships with Apple and Adobe and other folks to do what we need for the future.”

With some luck, this latest comment from Epic Games will spawn a host of unique opinions about the Xbox 720 from some of the other big names out there so be sure so keep checking in for all the latest updates.