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

I agree, the whole "each engine can do anything" development is a really good thing for the games industry. The less time spent trying to figure out the engine's quirks and working around them (or making your own engine even), the more time can be spent making the actual game content. And since games are becoming so unbelievably huge in terms of sheer amount of models and levels and so on that has to be put in, this is more or less a necessity at this point.

Of course there are downsides to everything, and I think the biggest issue would be that games made with the same engine have a tendency to sort of look alike... But I think that's something that developers can watch out for and avoid.

As for "focusing on consoles", I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that. I mean, I can understand what that means when you're developing a game (easier aiming, controls made for joypad, save points, bonus achievement-related content etc.), but for an entire engine I would think that there isn't such a huge difference between developing it on console or on PC. After all, the UE3 is used on PC and consoles pretty much interchangeably already. And aside from that, almost all big games are developed on PC before being brought to consoles, since there really isn't that huge of a difference between a console and a PC and I guess it's just easier to start out development on the PC than on a devkit.

I guess it won't be relevant for a long time anyway, but yeah I'm kinda curious what that means.

Jam it back in, in the dark.