Above: Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat [left] and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games at VRX.
Sweeney: Michael Abrash said that your eye is going to be able to distinguish resolution in games up to about 24K horizontal resolution. That’s dramatically higher than anything built today. It’s six times higher than a 4K display. It becomes extremely interesting once you get from current resolutions — about 1200 pixels at high resolution per eye, which is about the same experience as playing DOOM on a 14” monitor 20 years ago – to 4K displays per eye.
At that point you have the ability to display high quality text for user interfaces and a combination of 2D and 3D content that’s extraordinarily impressive and acceptable to users. It’s the difference between a Retina display and a legacy display.
Above: Dean Takahashi tries out the Everest VR demo with Nvidia and HTC VR tech.
GamesBeat: If that’s how good it can get, do you worry that in the meantime we’ll have such poor quality stuff that people just won’t take to it?
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Sweeney: We’re going to be in early adopter mode for at least the next two years. Now is the time to be investing.
If you look at the economics of the business, right now there are more than a million indie mobile developers worldwide producing 400,000 games per year. Maybe one percent of them actually make a living from their work. These 250 VR startups that have formed in the last couple of years, they’re ideally positioned to become leaders in their field. They have the opportunity. Some will succeed and some will fail, but now is the time to be making an investment.
There isn’t a whole lot of economic potential. You’re not going to be making a billion-dollar game for the next couple of years. But you can build an audience and make a name for yourself and create what needs to be carried forward to a leadership position when this reaches an exponential growth phase. The companies that are forged now are going to be the big winners in five or six years when the consumer market develops.
GamesBeat: You had a lot of discussion this year on the topic of the “indiepocalypse.” How does that tie to your views on the move to the new platform?
Sweeney: This is something we must avoid in the transition to VR, bringing in a million indie developers without any real hope of economic opportunity for most of them. In that regard, the indie revolution—it’s a small number of games making tens of millions of dollars, and then anyone who isn’t in the top one half of one percent isn’t earning any money.
The traditional game industry has provided a more fruitful model. There’s a much better correlation between high production value games and reliable revenue sources. You have reviewers and other marketing staples that drive gamers to a wide variety of games. There’s also a helpful stratification of the market into more genres of games, each reaching their own audience. It’s not just 400,000 games all competing for the same top 10 chart. It’s a much richer experience than that.
The other thing we’re seeing, which we’ve been participating by supporting modding—There was an indie game released that sold two million copies in its first couple of months of release. It was a game that supported modding and built its own modding community. For all these indie developers out there, there’s going to be a major business opportunity in building and expanding content for existing games. Instead of 400,000 games competing for the top 10, why not have a market with 50 top games in different genres and with different appeals, and hundreds of developers contributing content to all those games?
Valve announced earlier this year that Steam Workshop content creators made more than $40 million in the past year. That’s a real opportunity. I think it will become a much more viable model for a lot of the smaller studios.
GamesBeat: User-generated content is an escape route, in that case?
Sweeney: I think so. The market is becoming more functional and there are opportunities in stratification. There’s a wide variety of products and a rich ecosystem with different roles for people who want to be a part of that ecosystem.
GamesBeat: What’s your general view of tech? I think you’d said that in your two decades making games, processing power has increased 100,000 times. What are you expecting from advances in technology going forward?
Sweeney: We’re at an astonishing point already. We’re able to render these VR scenes with extremely high fidelity. The quality of rendering in modern games, and not even games — in architecture and product visualization — is astonishing.
We still have about two decades of major progress to go there. VR is going to be driving it. VR is going to require much more investment in GPU technology, battery technology and display technology. Everything we’re doing nowadays at Epic we’re doing to build the best VR experiences possible and support growth on the triple-A side.
GamesBeat: What do you think about the different pieces around VR that have to be developed still? The progress we’re making with hand gestures and body detection, what you’ll do with your legs, 3D audio — how do you feel about the rest of the technology around VR, beyond headsets?
Sweeney: We’re past the starting line now with the basic VR headsets — Oculus, HTC, Sony. They’re solid. They provide a starting point from here on. The motion controllers provide the first step toward direct input – going from moving a joystick to actually being able to reach out and manipulate things in a way that your brain has been doing since birth.
The next steps are going to happen along all axes. Huge advancements in display technology are needed, huge advancements in processing power. We also have to do a much better job of putting pixels where they matter. Even though your ideal display screen in VR would have to be 24,000 by 24,000 pixels to be indistinguishable from reality, your eye only has about 20 million photoreceptors. We have to draw pixels in the right place, where you can perceive them, by tracking your eyes. We’re going to need gesture-based tracking, so that you’re tracking not only one point of position or rotation for each hand, but the individual fingers, so you can reach out and interact with scenes.
Technology is going to be much of a race than people realize now. We’re thinking about games and we’re thinking about movies, but when you think about the content creation process — and this is something we’re building into the Unreal engine right now – instead of looking at your scenes on a 2D monitor and modeling them using a 2D interface with a lot of complicated shortcuts, you’ll be able to reach out and manipulate a scene. Pinch to zoom in, pinch to zoom out, look around, focus on objects—You’ll be able to do much more just using gestures. It will make the bar for getting into art, modeling, game design and everything else far lower than ever before. It’s going to work the way your brain works.
Above: Eve: Valkyrie is made for VR.
GamesBeat: Since it’s so hard to develop VR applications that don’t make you sick, do you feel more responsibility as the engine maker to show the way?
Sweeney: Absolutely. This is how we’ve approached every generation of technology. You start out with very early hardware prototypes. We build a series of tech demos, each one more advanced and building on the previous lessons, to learn what’s possible and show the world some of the opportunities that are out there. You can download the Unreal engine for free, download the Showdown demo for free, and see the content as we built it and play around with it.
This is the very first phase of our development for the new platform. The next phase is building games. Just as our early tech demos in the Unreal Engine 3 generation led to the development of Gears of War, we’re building on our arsenal of techniques for future Epic games.
GamesBeat: If I was a developer seeing your Bullet Time demo, I’d be a little intimidated. You did that with 12 people over 10 weeks.
Sweeney: Exactly. But it’s still small enough that an indie team could achieve something like that and then turn it into a full game and ship it in less than a year.
GamesBeat: That was just something to entertain us for a few minutes. How do you plan to build a game that people keep coming back to?
Sweeney: A lot of the work is in building a framework. Once you’ve built the new waves of enemies and the new types of weapons, it’s a pretty well-understood process. With the effort we put into this demo, I think we could ship is at a small scope, but high quality game.