The Xbox 360 and PS3 will have longer life cycles than almost any console before them, but they will almost certainly be replaced in a year or two. However, the progress of mobile has Epic Games President Mike Capps more interested.
“As a middleware provider and as a game developer it sure would be nice if all the different platforms were really similar for us it would make it easier to work between them with maybe just a few differentiating features we could take advantage of. I’d hate to say that the Wii U is late; in fact, you could almost argue that it’s early,” Capps began. “They’re aiming for a point beyond the current generation they’re just not leapfrogging it. One can certainly envision a future a couple years down the road where we have some significantly leapfrogged generation and then the Wii U again becomes a system that’s not easily portable between the other platforms. But honestly, I think the bigger challenge for us is mobile.”
“Before the problem was between the consoles and PC where they had very different levels. The power of your PC could be 100 times the power of somebody else’s PC. This time the problem could be mobile. If you look at the ridiculous acceleration of iPhone hardware and technology, trying to find a sweet spot for tech to make your mobile game… I mean, what would your mobile game look like in 2015 Who knows how fast that’s going to operate, but you can bet it’s going to be faster than an Xbox 360,” added Capps. “So I think that’s the real challenge for us now, rather than worrying about the difference between a couple consoles and some order of magnitude, whether 3X or 4X. It’s about how do we deal with iPhone 8… if you watch where the gamers are going that’s where they are. Your iPhone 8 will probably plug into your TV, or better yet, wirelessly connect to your television set to give you that big screen gaming experience with good sound. So really, what’s the point of those next-gen consoles It’s a very interesting situation to be looking at. That’s what we’re starting to think about more… not how do we scale from some Nintendo platform to some other future console.
Source: IndustryGamers {link no longer active}
