Epic always wants to see the future. Epic has become an influential force in the industry of videogame. In terms of tech Epic has been always a big player. In 2012, it was officially announced that Unreal Engine 4 is going to be part-acquired by Tencent. In the previous year, Epic had revealed a trailer of Fortnite, a small side-project. The team then can predict that the game might be a good fit for a free-to-play model. Now we can say this model becomes the future of this big success in the gaming industry.
Epic is actively looking to shape the future by operating so many sectors. A tech demo of Unreal Engine 5, made to run on PS5 and it seems this was the most finely detailed and dramatically well-lit environment. It shows that, how the next-gen games are going to look like. The idea of guiding behind Unreal Engine 5 is that the developers will need to use less manpower, time, and resources to create a next-gen visual. The engine is able to produce the best quality at a minimum amount of cost.
Brian Karis, technical director of graphics at Epic Games recalls, “It was kind of like a spark in the imagination. I had had a bunch of really good experiences with virtual texturing – I’d written my own virtual texturing system at a past company before coming to Epic. I’d seen how transformative that was for the team to not have to worry about texture budgets. I thought it would be great if we could apply the same sort of concept and approach – not the implementation exactly – to let the artists be free and not have to deal with budgets, not just for textures, but for geometry, for anything else.”
Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games says, “We’ve always been a game developer, and we want to build the kind of industry that we want ourselves as a game developer. There’s been some awesome examples of this throughout time. You look at all the projects that released their source code, and became much more widely used because of it.”
Epic is now focusing on providing all the advantages to developers for building an industry that’s “highly competitive, and healthy, and independent,” Sweeney says. Is Sweeney trying to say that the main goal for Epic is that to put an end to the console war of past decades?
