As building and creating assets for video games becomes increasingly time consuming, the production costs of video games have spiraled upwards, and that’s a real concern for developers and publishers. Now Epic’s CTO Tim Sweeney is claiming he expects the production costs of games to double for the next generation of consoles — and that’s only after streamlining Epic’s own Unreal technology.
Before that, Sweeney was worried the cost of production could be five times what it is today.
“[We] were worried that the cost would go up by a factor of three or four or even five in the next generation,” he said, speaking to GamesIndustry International. “And of course, we felt that was not acceptable.”
According to Tim Sweeney, the amount of time and production put into Epic’s Samaritan clip, which was intended to show off the company’s new technology, convinced everyone that the team had to spend more time making its toolset more efficient.
Interestingly enough Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick claimed, earlier this month, that he expected the production costs of video games to decrease over the next generation, as a result of new technology making the act of making video games a little less time consuming.
Epic expects next-gen dev costs to double [GamesIndustry International]
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