Unreal engine 3 is one of the most scalable engines arround it scales from the iPhone 3GS to top end PCs, it's just the Samaritan demo that requires 10x the power to run. As in the tech demo that showcasses all the high end stuff the engine can do....

They wouldn't be making such hyperbolic statements if they did not feel that their position was somehow under threat. Either that or Mark Rein is just being a blowhard, which is fairly likely given his historical statements.

It's just that some of their comments lately regarding next gen consoles have been giving me the impression that Sony/MS/both are not targetting the kind of hardware they want and they've been trying to stir up the pot to pressure them into doing more.

It's in their best interest, I think, for MS and Sony to put in the most bleeding edge hardware they can. Remember how they pushed MS to go for 512mb RAM?

Eh their business is fine, never been better in fact. Mark Rein is a oppionated guy and he speaks his mind, he is a very frank guy. But his oppnions come from being a gamer as much as a business man and as a programmer most of all.

I get the impression it's more, this is what we want and this is what you will get if you give it. As a business I don't think it will matter much if the consoles aren't much more powerful than this gen, like I said they were massively successful selling their engine on current hardware that won't cange if the next hardware is not cutting edge. But as game designers and programmers they would be more than happy to get as much power as possible and at least some of the higher ups seem to abide by the theory that one of the primary motivators for moving to the next generation is the ability to show gamers things that were never possible before, that means power and games that utalise it. Or as the Wii showed new ways to control and interact with games. But considering that MS, Sony and Nintendo have already done that this generation with peripherals it is going to have to be pretty amazing to convince developers to move away from current install basses and for customers to fork over the cash for new consoles. And every generation in the past has come with a significant leap in power (and small leaps have never done well exept for the Wii, Xbox and GCN were slightly more powerful but not enough for totally different looking games, same for the N64, PS3, 3DO etc), it maybe the least imaganitive way of pushing a new generation from a hardware design perspective but it has been shown to work and short of some mind reading device I don't see another option.

So if manufacturers can't or won't do power or totally new controlls then they might as well stick with the current gen. But that means that iPads are going to be more powerful than dedicated consoles in a few years, as epic pointed out the iPad 3 already has a higher resolution and more RAM than current consoles. Whether Apple will make the neccessary moves to position that tech as a competitor to consoles (or whether they even need to) is another topic entirely.

Epic....fail? I did find the part about pushing MS to go with 512mb of RAM to be very interesting. Every 360 gamer should thank them for that, even with 512 the RAM still seems like the biggest thing holding back the 360 (and the PS3) as opposed to PC's. A 360 with 256mb would have been a very less capable machine than the 360 we know today and would have really hurt multiplatform (360/PS3/PC) games for everybody 360 owner or not.

It seem important to Epic that next gen hardware is super-powerful. It would ensure alot of demand for UE4 instead of devs just sticking with UE3 because it can do all they really need.

They want to dominate next gen with an engine that others can't keep up with like they did this gen. They don't want guys like Crytek  moving up the ladder even more.

Also, Ipad isn't a  threat to consoles hardware-wise or software -wise.

if there isn't a significant leap in power why would there need to be a next gen in the first place?

there is no real business incentice to sell UE4 over UE3 as they sell it as a license and on a royalty bassed business model for indies, they are contracted to give developers updated engines, and they want indies and learing institutions to get their current tech. And super powerful hardware gives competitors like Crytech more chance to catch up not less as there will be far more room to inovate in the graphics tech with new hardware. Hell Crytech are pushing for more powerful consoles than Epic are, you should see their wishlist with "At least 8GB RAM" 3 GPUs and an 8 core CPU.

Unreal engine wasn't successful because it was the "most powerful" they were just the only ones agressively pushing licensed engines, no one else was really doing it before Epic made it big. id and Valve let people license their engines but didn't actively try and push it and didn't support it they just gave devs the source and demanded a fee and most devs before this gen built a new engine for every game they made. Epic came along and by pushing it into learning institutions and by offering it to developers at a "cheap" rate while also keeping their tech at the same level as prepriatary engines that other studios were making combined with ever incressing costs captured the market.

They will be tailoring UE4 to next gen consoles no matter how powerful they are.

This.

People seem to forget how sales are getting more proportionate with graphics as time passes by, which is also a great reason to why the Wii U has to be released first. MS/Sony tried to overlook this by releasing Kinect and Move, but that obviously didn't help sales too much, and soon there will be no more room left for price cuts.