Epic’s Tim Sweeney believes virtual reality will evolve more like console games than mobile

It seems like we just can’t get enough of Tim Sweeney, chief executive of Epic Games.

Sweeney has been a video game graphics guru for more than two decades. During that time, he has seen computing technology get 100,000 times faster. He has such a command of tech that it’s fun to pick his brain about what will happen in the future.

We had a chance to talk to him about his views in a fireside chat at our GamesBeat 2015 event. But we also caught up with him for a deeper dive into virtual reality and augmented reality at the VRX conference this week in San Francisco. Epic makes game engine tools for would-be VR developers, but it also is working on cool VR demos, such as Bullet Train, that show developers the way forward in this young and growing sector of the gaming industry, which tech adviser Digi-Capital expects to be a $150 billion industry by 2020.

Sweeney is a big fan of VR, but he has some cautionary advice for startups. And he worries about overinvestment at a time when the market is just getting started. But in the long run, Sweeney sees how VR is going to change just about everything. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney at VRX.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: We’ve heard a lot about the “metaverse,” in reference to the virtual world from author Neil Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash. I’m curious about what you think this is actually going to be.

Tim Sweeney: With at least 250 companies working on VR now, a large number of them are working on realizing the Metaverse, this science-fiction idea of virtual reality and all that it leads to. It’s an interesting topic. There’s been a lot of technical writing about what’s possible. But we have to be careful.

We’ve learned a lot about the workings of the internet from social networks and massively multiplayer games. These are real world incarnations of something like the Metaverse. But they’re going to have some fairly significant differences. Like most real-world things, they’re not going to be quite so utopian. They’re going to be shaped by market forces and social forces.

We’ve seen all these attempts eventually degenerate into chat-oriented universes rather than game-oriented universes. Having rule systems and game systems in place to guide players is a big part of it.

GamesBeat: How is AR and VR gaming going to develop? Is it going to be more like the mobile gaming market or more like consoles?

Sweeney: That’s the fundamental question. Here in the Silicon Valley area, I think a lot of people are approaching this from the point of view of the mobile gaming revolution and trying to extrapolate that to VR. But VR is very different. The mobile gaming experience is fundamentally limited by this very small screen in front of you that occupies maybe 15 degrees of your field of view. The PC and console experience you have a 45-degree field of view.

VR is 120 degrees, your entire view space. The expectations of users on the platform will rise to levels we’ve never seen before. The console and high-end PC businesses have a lot more to teach us about development in this business than the mobile business. We’re going to see large teams producing some very novel, high-end experiences. They’re going to redefine the state of the art in photorealism.

GamesBeat: When we had our history of gaming here, it was pretty orderly in some ways: arcade games, PC games, console games, and you eventually got to mobile games. Virtual reality is fairly disorderly. We have VR appearing first on mobile. Samsung is shipping its Gear VR headset on November 20 for its phones. How are we going to have an expected unfolding of this technology, given that mobile is coming at the same time as the PC experience?

Sweeney: Mobile is going to introduce a lot of gamers to VR for the first time, which is a valuable thing. But everybody who gets into this market is going to start comparing experiences between the different platforms, and high-end experiences are going to dominate. There’s going to be more of a race to the top, to deliver the best, highest-powered gaming experiences.

That can be done on a mobile platform, but you’re going to need very powerful devices. You’re going to need advances in technology. You’ll have a lot of horses vying to deliver experiences are competitive.

GamesBeat: Do you think that’s going to drive a high-quality experience on mobile?

Sweeney: Absolutely. We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible there. The limitations of the smaller screens on these devices have diminished the value of pushing the GPU technology harder than we’ve been pushing it, because you don’t need to produce something excellent if it’s going to be displayed on these tiny screens.

When you’re completely immersed in this full field of view of experience, you’re going to value the high quality experiences much more than the low quality ones. We’re going to see an entire revolution take place in the field of mobile devices.

As far as today’s mobile devices, they’re limited by weight and form factor. You need to hold it in the hand as you use it. The future form factors for mobile VR and AR could be something that fits in your pocket, with a more powerful battery and GPU sending a signal to glasses on your head. We’ll see some major innovations in form factor there.