Epic’s founder Tim Sweeney sees a future of far fewer big budget games: “The industry’s changing – this generation it seems like there are about a third of the number of triple-A titles in development across the industry as there was last time around – and each one seems to have about three times the budget of the previous generation,” he told Edge. “I think we’re heading towards a future where triple-A is the minority.”
That’s why the company switched its licensing to cheap monthly subscription and royalty deal.
“It’s meant to be as accessible to indies as a subscription to an MMO,”Sweeney said. “As these triple-A games are seeing fewer releases then the empty spaces in between are being filled by indie projects of all scales.
“They’re really being developed in a completely new way – rather than being built over a very long period of time and then released with a massive marketing campaign, you’re seeing a Kickstarter and then preview versions becoming available that are incrementally improved over time.”
That said, he also told Edge there are a lot of games on the way that use Unreal Engine 4, “a large number of them haven’t been announced. You’ll see lots of triple-A stuff coming out over time.”
Just think what games will be like in a year’s time when the engine has features like this:
You should read the rest of Edge’s interview, it goes into why they’ve been quiet on the development front for so long.