[News] Unreal Engine 4 will focus on consoles - PCs only secondary

Well middleware has it's place as SiliconKnights eventually came to learn. Things like UE3 are great for people who want to just throw something out the door, or who has limited resources given to them to begin with and needs a means of trimming time off the R&D cycle of development. But for larger companies who have larger resources and wants to make a complicated AAA game, it's probably not the way they want to go.

More towards topic though, does this really surprise anyone? With the cost of PC hardware on one end and the amount of PC piracy on the other, the PC gaming community (companies and users) really have widdled their market into a very small group of people.

Also Epic makes the majority of their money off of licensing their engine, and there's a lot more console developers out there then PC ones. Especially considering how hard it is to create your own engine for a console compared to a PC. That's a much larger market for Epic to license to.

All in all I'm surprised that Epic didn't make this move back at the time of UE2. However I'm not that surprised that they did eventually make the move.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

When it comes to wide open spaces and detailed animation systems with more then 12(or so) characters the engine begins to chug. Which is why a game has to have either condensed levels like Gears (or Stranglehold) or large areas like Lost Odyssey that have few characters within them. No my friend, I know what I'm talking about. You just wish to toss me aside instead of looking into the matter yourself because it's easier.

This is the problem with the engine that SK discovered. If you have too many characters on screen + large enviroments the engine is broken. Which is why Gears of War can only have 12 characters on screen at any given time.

Are there big games using UE3, yes. However they either have to make sacrifices to the game for the engine to work, or they have to tailor the engine to work for them. why do you thing BIH: HH among other UE3 games have been pushed back so many times?

@Qwarky
Half-Life is not a UE3 game. And MAss Effect is plagued with technical issues, which more feeds my point more then anything else.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Exactly, there are inherent issues with the code of the engine that can hurt the games using UE3 on a console. That's all I was trying to say from the start.

@Qwarky
I didn't say that AAA games can't be made with UE3. What I said was,

"Things like UE3 are great for people who want to just throw something out the door, or who has limited resources given to them to begin with and needs a means of trimming time off the R&D cycle of development."

Basically what I said is that small games or games with short dev cycles is what it's best at. Doesn't mean that it's all you can do with it

How ya doing, buddy?

So basically instead of just buying a PhysX license a Speed Tree license and so on and tweaking it for a console they just purchase UE3 which already has thoes licenses (and more) which are also already tweaked for a console and use thoes instead of buying and tweaking it all themselves right? Well then, if they run into problems doing that then that's more their fault because they're not using Kismet and other such programs which are part of UE3 that your supposed to use to bring it all together. You're not suppose to create some frankenstein thing using 30% of engine A and 70% of engine B.

If that's the main problem at heart I definately didn't know that. And don't pretend that you did Colonel, because I'm sure that if you did know that you would have pulled that out along with every other offensive move you made against me.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?