While fans and gamers await the next generation of consoles with Christmas-morning delight, producers and developers are looking at the bottom line.
Tim Sweeney, chief technology officer at Epic Games, predicts that next-gen titles will cost twice as much to develop. That is, however, a lot better than Sweeney and the Epic team originally feared, citing the “Samaritan” demo video (below), which took four months and 30 developers to make.
“If we extrapolate that into creating an entire game, we were worried that the cost would go up by a factor of three or four or even five in the next generation,” Sweeney told GameIndustry International at the Montreal International Game Summit. “And of course, we felt that was no acceptable.”
Epic stemmed the potential financial bleeding, it seems, by improving production efficiency.
In the same interview, Sweeney also addressed free-to-play gaming, saying, “(it) is becoming more and more inevitable.”
Here’s that “Samaritan” video mentioned above:
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