The longtime Epic Games CEO says that these new consoles will solve old problems for game developers, though he still has concerns on how Microsoft will be approaching game development for Windows 10.
"From an industry insider perspective, the console industry will grow and sustain its user base much better if it doesn't have to reset its user base to zero every seven years. The idea of throwing everything out and doing everything from scratch every seven years is completely crazy.”
—Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, praising the announcements of the Xbox Scorpio and the Playstation Neo.
The announcement of the mid-generation console updates for the Xbox One and Playstation 4 have rattled some developers and innervated others, but you can now count Epic CEO Tim Sweeney in the latter group when it comes to making games for these new devices.
Speaking with Eurogamer, Sweeney has nothing but praise for the Xbox Scorpio and Playstation Neo, saying the new versions of older consoles will solve problems Epic has been grappling with for years.
“It gives you the best of both worlds,” Sweeney explains in the interview. “[It offers] the upgrade cycle of the PC which ensures that people always have access to the latest and greatest hardware and games don't go out of date over a seven year cycle, together with the fact there's a box you can go and buy - or two boxes - and you're guaranteed that everything can work.”
Sweeney’s comments indicate his company has a forward-facing stance on adapting its tech to work with these new consoles. He also adds that since both consoles look to be expanding their GPU power over the CPU, it’ll be helpful for developers looking to improve their games’ performance.
“As game developers, you can spend far more time doing far more optimization for CPU than GPU. GPU is a perfectly parallel brute force computing device, if you give us a fixed algorithm and tell us to make it two times faster there's not much we can do, you can spend a year making our game run twice as fast.”
“If you look at what's going on in the industry, it's still propelling GPU performance growth over CPU performance growth, which is a trend I think is going to continue."
Sweeney’s praise for Microsoft hasn’t dulled his critique of the company’s plans for the Xbox platform however. He tells Eurogamer that though he’s been in conversation with people from Microsoft, his fears that the company will make Windows 10 a closed PC gaming platform aren’t alleviated.
“My concern remains that Microsoft is holding the option of using its power of monopoly to force consumer PCs into their store and out of other competing software sources,” Sweeney says. “Microsoft has said a lot about the topic, but they haven't committed that they'll maintain Windows as an open platform.”
And Sweeney’s concerns about that commitment do relate to Microsoft’s plans for the future of Project Scorpio especially given their (recently altered) promises to simultaneously release games on Xbox and Windows 10.
“I'm grateful that they're always willing to discuss these things. What we really want is a commitment that that won't happen so we can adapt these new technologies with confidence they won't be used against us in the future.”
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