Epic CTO sees next gen development costs doubling, though they could have been higher

Epic Games chief technology officer Tim Sweeney expects development costs for next generation consoles to double, Gamesindustry.biz reports.

Speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit, Sweeney said that the developer's first next gen demo, a three-minute video called Samaritan, took a 30-person team three months to create in Unreal Engine 3, indicating that costs might have been much higher than double.

"If we extrapolate that into creating an entire game, we were worried that the cost would go up by a factor of three or four or even five in the next generation," Sweeney said at the conference. "And of course, we felt that was not acceptable."

As a result of the demo, Epic optimized its Unreal Engine production tools, which allowed the company to curb potential development costs. He now expects them to be "only about double" of what they were at the beginning of the current console generation.

Earlier this year, Epic unveiled Unreal Engine 4, the next generation of its widely-used game engine. Epic's Fortnite, which Polygon saw at San Diego Comic Con 2012, will be the company's first game to use the engine.