Interesting stuff…
The interview is very interesting – Jon Stokes interviewing Tim Sweeney about the future of game graphics.
I think Sweeney is perhaps a little oversold on the whole new world just around the corner. His fundamental complaint – that modern game development involves load balancing across multiple chips, languages, vendors – i.e. that it’s hideously and – in his view – unnecessarily complex – seems valid, but the fact is everything gets more horrible and complex and dramatic resimplifications have been very rare in the past – look where we are now, running Macs on Intel architecture (with its RISC pretending to be a retarded CISC using all kinds of tricks, and FPU and Vector Units sitting off to the side, and a slab of code running a PowerPC emulator…)
At one point he wonders aloud if there might be some future console with a single multicore part on it that does everything. But then he ends with a key observation that if coding for the “new world” turns out to cost three times as much for a given title, it just won’t work. All indications are that it will probably cost MORE than three times as much.
Indeed, even if the new world happens, I suspect we’ll just see a few engine vendors selling middleware to everyone else, pretty much like today. The real question is whether the dominant player will still be Microsoft.