Despite fears to the contrary, Epic Games Vice President Mark Rein has said the company’s Unreal Engine 4 will in fact run on PCs as well as the next generation of consoles.
Many gamers took earlier comments by Epic co-founder Tim Sweeney that the Unreal Engine 4 was being developed exclusively for the next generation of game consoles to mean the company was dropping, or at least seriously curtailing, support for the PC in its upcoming projects. But in an interview with CVG, Rein assured gamers that this is not the case at all, and that the PC figures prominently in Epic’s plans for the future.
“What he meant was, it won’t run on this generation of consoles, but people assumed what he meant was that it won’t run on PCs. Hello – all game technology runs on PC, that’s how you build it,” Rein said. “Of course it’ll be on PC. That should go without saying.”
“But people took that as us abandoning PCs – and Tim said something about UE4 coming to consoles first. Unreal Engine 3 came out on consoles first – there’s nothing new about that,” he continued. “That’s the way it works; the console guys were, in this generation, able to spend the money to put the really high-end parts out before they were even available on PC. Of course, the PC comes flying up behind and will have much better performance that consoles by the time the generation is over.”
“You’re able to buy a PC that’s as powerful as the Xbox 360 long before the 360 generation is finished. So people, calm down. If we give conflicting views and say things that are negative, it’s because we care about it and we want it to be strong, and we’re going to work to make it strong,” he said. “Relax, take a breath… PC gaming will be fine.”
CVG’s full interview with Epic’s Mark Rein is available here.
