Speaking to IGN in a ‘developers react to PS4′ piece, Sweeney said Sony took the best parts of PC and forged it with custom hardware to build a system that takes gaming to the next level, while making development an ease for game creators.

The PlayStation 4 is a leading-edge hardware platform, and its enormous CPU, GPU and memory resources enables Unreal Engine 4 to reach levels of visual quality and detail that go far beyond the current generation, for games of all sizes and genres.

The features and effects in our new “Elemental” demo on PlayStation 4 are just the tip of the iceberg, showing dynamic lighting and shadowing, subsurface scattering and GPU-powered particle effects at full 1080p resolution.

As the developers of the Unreal Engine, we’re passionate about not only building great games, but building them efficiently. PlayStation 4 builds upon PC technology and takes it to the next level, providing a very robust and easy-to-use development environment.

The console sees a launch later this year, but the only confirmed region for launch is the United States. Sony, however, is hoping Europe and Japan could get it at the same time. Canada usually sees the console the same time as the U.S.

“There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,” said Gears of War design director Cliff Bleszinski in a Wired article. “It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap. They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it – even if they don’t know they want it.”

Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney added: “We’re much more in sync with the console makers than any other developer is. That means we can give detailed recommendations with a complete understanding of what is going to be commercially possible.”

With the recently released Unreal Engine 4 screenshots, Epic Games is hoping to set a high standard for the next batch of consoles, and we applaud them for their efforts. But will Sony and Microsoft take seriously what the firm has to say? Because although Epic Games is giving advise freely, at the end of the day it’ll take lots of cash to have PS4 and Xbox 720 render such visuals, and we all know who’s footing the bill.

Unreal Engine 4 will be unveiled at E3 next month.

“This is too many platforms,” Sweeney said at the summit in Las Vegas last night. “We’re seeing now iPad sales have surpassed the sales of PCs. This is a real revelation, this is a product that wasn’t invented until a few years ago and it’s basically supplanting personal computers.

Over time these platforms will be whittled down to a competing set of platforms to maybe three winners worldwide across everything – computers, game platforms, smartphones… We should expect a lot of consolidation here and winners and losers according to who picks the right directions and executes successfully.”

Sweeney continued, pointing towards the significant steps in technology that’s brought us this far, including Kinect-like motion control, cloud and augmented reality, contending we’re only now scratching the surface of such breakthroughs.

“There are a lot of technical challenges. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the consumer implications, what we can do with an iPad or iPhone today is limited by our experience of our computers and history.

I see a bright future for technology and its implications on games. The ability of game developers to exploit another thousand-fold increase in computing power on future generations of platforms.

Some of it will be consoles, some of it PC and some of it tablets. The form factor we can’t predict, but the opportunity is there. Our industry’s brightest days are yet to come.”

I tend to agree with the man, can’t have too many cooks in the kitchen, they’ll only spoil the soup.

Via GI.biz.

“With every console transition, people ask if there will be another console transition or another successful console platform. We are betting big that there will be. If you look at games like Call of Duty and Gears of War, it’s clear that console is the pinnacle of the gaming experience. so we are investing heavily with our engine and game development efforts for the next generation of console technology and games. But at the same time, we actually see this wonderful thing happening where the mobile platform and web platforms are getting to the point where they can run a AAA game. One consistent game engine technology can run across console, PC, mobile and web games. We’re really happy with that position. It lets game developers target lots of different platforms. We have shipped Infinity Blade of iOS. We have announced a new game Fortnite for an entirely different audience, more casual. It appeals to a wider audience than a hardcore game like Gears of War. We are branching out, but we tie it all together with AAA production values.

The longevity of this console generation has been a mixed blessing. On the game side, it’s been really great for our business. We have been able to ship three Gears of War games on the same generation of hardware, each one with dramatic improvements over the last and a two to three-year development cycle. So it’s been a very good thing for a game business today. With each new title, there is a bigger and bigger Xbox 360 installed base of users, so the games can sell more. On the other hand, it gets harder to generate the same excitement from the same hardware. That is when the new hardware is justified. But then you reset the installed base to zero and it’s a lot harder to sell a lot of games again. So you should only replace the hardware when you can make a dramatic leap in quality, not just 2X or 3X. It has to be huge and fundamentally new.

If you create awesome technology for the wrong platform, then nobody will ever adopt it. Epic in general has always tried to be really savvy on the business side. We look at the business models and changing trends and try to stay on top of them. If you look at Epic, we began as a shareware game company in the 1990s making really tiny games. Then we pulled together into one huge team and created the first Unreal game. At that point, we needed to build a huge game to compete with the likes of id Software. We changed our company dramatically to do that. Around 2004, we decided the game industry’s sweet spot was moving to consoles. So we made the transition from a PC game company to a console game company with Gears of War. Now we see new changes afoot with the move to mobile and web gaming with Adobe Flash. So we put together business relationships with Apple and Adobe and other folks to do what we need for the future.”

Thanks, OXM.

While gamers are busy gaming, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney spends most of his time researching what will become next-generation gaming technology in 2014.

“I spend about 60 percent of my time every day doing research work that’s aimed at our next generation engine and the next generation of consoles,” Sweeney told IGN.

“This is technology that won’t see the light of day until probably around 2014, but focusing on that horizon enables me to do some really cool things that just aren’t practical today, but soon will be,” he added.

“Some of our most productive work in the industry was on the first Unreal engine back in 1996, when I wrote a software vendor with a bunch of new features that hadn’t been seen before. I feel like that’s what I’m doing now on Unreal Engine 4 in exploring areas of the technology nobody else is really yet contemplating because they’re still a few years away from practicality. But I see a huge amount of potential there and so it’s very, very fun work.”

Sweeney believes two of the biggest innovations to be had in next-generation gaming will be “movie quality graphics and movie quality pixels on the screen, which mean no flicker in the visuals, no popping artifacts, no bulky character outlines on the screen at all.

I expect I’ll be actively programming at the time we’ve achieved full movie-quality graphics because that’s really just a matter of brute force computing power and clever algorithm.”

The developer also believes AI will play a major role in enhancing the gaming experience to heights previously unattainable.

“The other area is simulation of human aspects of the game experience,” he said, “simulation of gameplay characters, artificial intelligence, character dialogue and all of these other things which aren’t really problems of brute force computing. They require increasingly sophisticated algorithms and simulation of human intelligence. I have no idea when those problems will be solved. I’m quite sure they won’t be solved in the next ten years.”