Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney looks forward to less marketing budgets and more development budgets

Epic Games Tim Sweeney

In an interview with Edge Online, Tim Sweeney the founder of Epic Games and creator of the Unreal engine, commented on the future of gaming graphics and business. He expressed enthusiasm regarding future console graphics and also predicted the fall of retail game sales followed by the dominant rise of online game sales. Tim Sweeney continued expressing that game development budgets should focus far less on marketing and more on development, which will produce “insane” results.

Read the full excerpt below…

“We’re more enthusiastic now than ever about the future of high-end platforms. What we’re doing on high-end PCs is going to be representative of the future consumer gaming experience and it’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be a substantial leap over the current generation.”

“The market is inefficient now. You run ads on television so that people walk into a retail store, buy a piece of plastic and stick it into their digitally connected device. I think we have a lot of latitude – publishers and developers alike – to increase the efficiency of that. Once you have a game, it’s available pervasively online, and your devices are all Internet-connected, do you really need to run television ads to get people to find it at the top of the App Store?”

“I’m looking forward to our digital future. Development budgets are going to be the dominant cost in the industry, and [increasing] the efficiency of building games will directly improve profitability. As we move more sales of games out of retail, that creates a lot more flexibility for developers to make games at different scales and price them differently.”

“If you look at games that just encompass triple-A production values, there’s a huge range of scales where games have been successful and profitable. You don’t need $100 million to build a triple-A game. But if you want to spend that much, you can build one that looks absolutely insane.” 

Check out the Unreal Engine 4 tech demo, created by Tim Sweeney’s company, Epic Games, last year…

Epic Games Official Site 

Unreal Engine 4 Official Site

Source: Edge Online

Leave a Reply