Xbox 720 and PS4 may be another year or two away, but you can be sure that the leading edge game developers are already thinking about what could be possible with new, more powerful hardware. Epic Games in particular hopes to push tech boundaries. CEO Tim Sweeney noted that the existing hardware should only be replaced "when you can make a dramatic leap in quality, not just 2X or 3X. It has to be huge and fundamentally new."
Sweeney, speaking to VentureBeat, explained that this prolonged console cycle has been a "mixed blessing." He commented, "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."
Sweeney pointed out again that Epic is always eager to talk with platform holders to ensure that hardware is advanced enough to enable big leaps in quality. With the Xbox 360, for example, Epic persuaded Microsoft to up the RAM from 256MB to 512MB, and while that cost Microsoft about $1 billion more, it also enabled Gears of War games to look far more detailed.
So you can bet that Epic is trying to get its point across for the next-gen with Microsoft and Sony now. "With each generation, we think really deeply about what it’s going to take to fundamentally distinguish it from the previous generation. We don’t want it just twice as good. We want it dramatically better. We fight really hard with our partners to get there. We do our part on the software side," Sweeney said.
He added, "...we do that with each generation. Some of the conversations you will hear about, but these are also going on the behind scenes. The conversations happen across the board, not just with the console makers."
