Epic Believes Development Costs Will Double Next-Gen

During a keynote at the Montreal International Game Summit (via GamesIndustry), Sweeney explained that the price hike actually isn't quite as bad as they initially feared, especially after having pour loads of time, money and effort into the "Samaritan" tech demo they showed off last year. “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. And of course, we felt that was not acceptable.”

With a some clever work in making the process more efficient, they've been able to get the cost down to roughly double. Even still, that is a lot of money and precious time being poured into a single product. With this in mind, Sweeney went on to emphasize the rising role of free-to-play games and their ability to change the market. 

“If a user has world-class, AAA free-to-play games to choose from side-by-side with $60 games that are available only on a disc in a retail store, free-to-play games are very likely to win. So we need to really be mindful of this trend and start building games that have monetization and are designed to be piracy-proof," Sweeney said.

As long as the game prices or development times don't double, that's fine by me.