Epic Games chief technology officer Tim Sweeney indicates that next-generation development costs should only be about twice what current AAA development costs are. After the creation of the Samaritan tech demo took longer and with more people than expected, the company doubled down on content and production tools to improve production efficiency.
“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 said. “And of course, we felt that was not acceptable.”
Sweeney also sees a future where free-to-play cross platform titles are more common as high-resolution displays and multicore CPUs become more widely available. “Free to play gaming is becoming more and more inevitable,” Sweeney said. “If a user has world-class, AAA free-to-play games to choose from side-by-side with $60 games that are available only on a disc in a retail store, free-to-play games are very likely to win. So we need to really be mindful of this trend and start building games that have monetization and are designed to be piracy-proof.”
Source: GamesIndustry International
