Epic: Next-Gen Development Double the Cost Compared to Now, F2P an “Inevitability”

With games today cost a ton of money to produce and market, Epic CTO Tim Sweeney thinks that development cost for the Xbox 720 and PS4 will be double what publishers and studios pay now.

Speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit (via GamesIndustry), Sweeney comments that he expects Epic to be able to build next-gen games for "only double the cost" of games from the start of the current generation.

While that's certainly troubling for developers and publishers not named EA or Activision, Sweeney thinks it could have been worse. He gave Epic's first next-gen tech demo, Samaritan, as an example. Shown off in 2011, Samaritan was built to show off Direct X 11 in a modified version of Unreal Engine 3. Sweeney admits that they were "greatly worried" about the cost, since the tech demo required a team of 30 people to create and took four months for a three-minute clip.

Samaritan convinced Epic to double down on their content and production tools and they managed to trim the costs down with improved production efficiency.

Sweeney also commented on the state of free-to-play gaming and how it's an "inevitablity."

Free to play gaming is becoming more and more inevitable…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.

His statements mirror those of other studio heads that also think that gaming is headed to a F2P future.

Do you think development costs should be dialed back a bit or should publishers take more money out of marketing? Aside from EA, Activision, Take-Two and Ubisoft, I don't think there's another publisher that can produce games at double the cost for next-gen. I mean, some publishers can try, but betting on the wrong horse might make it go the way of THQ, no?