Speaking during an interview with Eurogamer, Tim Sweeney, co-founder and CEO of Epic Games, has expressed his enthusiasm at the upcoming PlayStation Neo and Xbox Scorpio, which look set to disrupt the traditional console cycle when they eventually see the light of day.
Sweeney reckons a mid-cycle refresh is exactly what the games industry needs at this point, suggesting the traditional console model is no longer viable. In addition, it also benefits Epic from a game development perspective.
"I’m absolutely thrilled with this," said Sweeney. "It gives you the best of both worlds, the upgrade cycle of the PC which ensures that people always have access to the latest and greatest hardware and games don’t go out of date over a seven year cycle, together with the fact there’s a box you can go and buy – or two boxes – and you’re guaranteed that everything can work. And I think the configurations for developers are very reasonable.
"From an industry insider perspective, the console industry will grow and sustain its user base much better if it doesn’t have to reset its user base to zero every seven years. The idea of throwing everything out and doing everything from scratch every seven years is completely crazy. And everything Epic’s done with our new game development approach, involving these online games we’re going to maintain over time, it’s about building games where we don’t have to reset our user base to zero when we want to add new features."
"There’s value to 4K," he continued. "These 4K television are incredibly high quality and becoming very economical so supporting them will be good. From a typical users TV, a lot of users are going to prefer having that 3 to 4 times the computing power applied towards making the existing number of pixels look that much better. I think games will choose different routes. At any rate every game should be expected to deliver a 3X or better improvement in graphics quality as a result of this new hardware – whether they do it through higher resolution or prettier pixels is a decision for each game, and different games will exploit it in different ways."
PlayStation Neo had been rumored since the beginning of the year, with reports suggesting a reveal before the release of PlayStation VR and a possible launch in holiday 2016, priced at $400.
Sony finally confirmed the Neo’s existence during a chat with The Guardian, although it did not showcase the new hardware at E3 2016 last month. Instead, the company is rumored to unveil the Neo at the Tokyo Game Show in September.
Microsoft on the other hand was quite vocal about its future plans at E3, confirming not only the Xbox Scorpio for a holiday 2017 launch, but also unveiling the Xbox One S for release this summer.