Theo Valich (left), Tim Sweeney

Interview - We got a chance to sit down with one of the sparkling celebrities of the IT industry during the the Game Developers Conference 2008: Tim Sweeney is founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the famous Unreal game engines.

TG Daily editor Theo Valich spoke with Sweeney about the future of the PC as a game platform, the role of the next-generation of game consoles, the next Unreal engine as well as the future of Epic.

We have known Sweeney for several years and are always looking forward to his view on the state of the gaming industry, which he is not afraid to discuss openly. In this first part of our three-part interview, Sweeney takes on the PC, which he believes is in trouble and can’t keep up with game consoles, mistakes in Windows Vista and the integrated graphics dilemma.

Tim Sweeney, Part 2: “DirectX 10 is the last relevant graphics API”

Tim Sweeney, Part 3: "Unreal Engine 4.0 aims at next-gen console war"

TG Daily: Tim, Unreal has grown into a big success much because of the PC as a great gaming platform. We have heard about a new gaming PC alliance that wants to promote gaming on the PC versus gaming on the console. What is your view on that, especially on those stunningly expensive gaming rigs?

Sweeney: There are many overpriced computers out there. It's like sports cars. They are everywhere, everybody writes about them, but there are only a few who can afford them. There isn't a great amount of people that will spend large amounts of money on that. In the case of PCs, they mostly don't deliver that amount of performance that you would expect to justify that cost. You pay twice as much money for 30% more performance... That is just not right.


TG Daily: What about those high-end features? Do you think that industry is actually sending the wrong message when it comes to gaming? Do you feel that the hardware industry went with wrong message when it started to talk about 3-Way SLI and other high-end things, while they did not work on expanding the PC gaming message to masses?

Sweeney: Absolutely. That was a terrible mistake. Marketing people believe that there is a small number of people who are gamers and who can afford spending good amount of money on buying high end hardware.

TG Daily: You have to admit, the margin is obviously there.

Sweeney: Agreed. But it is very important not to leave the masses behind. This is unfortunate, because PCs are more popular than ever. Everyone has a PC. Even those who did not have a PC in the past are now able to afford one and they use it for Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever. Yesterday’s PCs were for people that were working and later playing games. Even if those games were lower-end ones, there will always be a market for casual games and online games like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has DirectX 7-class graphics and can run on any computer. But at the end of the day, consoles have definitely left PC games behind.


TG Daily: But we mostly talk about conventional retail sales. Do you see an increasing divide between the Pc and consoles?

Sweeney: Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference [to more capable gaming PCs]. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that. Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x.


TG Daily: In other words: Too big?  

Sweeney: Yes, that is huge difference. If we go back 10 years ago, the difference between the high end and the lowest end may have been a factor of 10. We could have scaled games between those two. For example, with the first version of Unreal, a resolution of 320x200 was good for software rendering and we were able to scale that up to 1024x768, if you had the GPU power. There is no way we can scale down a game down by a factor of 100, we would just have to design two completely different games. One for low-end and one for high-end.
That is actually happening on PCs: You have really low-end games with little hardware requirements, like Maple Story. That is a $100 million-a-year business. Kids are addicted to those games, they pay real money to buy [virtual] items within the game and the game.

TG Daily: Broken down, that means today’s mainstream PCs aren’t suitable for gaming?

Sweeney: Exactly. PCs are good for anything, just not games. 

Read on the next page: "Intel’s integrated graphics just don't work. I don't think they will ever work."