Planning for PlayStation 5 and the next gen Xbox console (ninth generation consoles) from 2020

Hi! Is Unreal Engine being developed for the the coming of new generation of consoles? Sony has announced that the PlayStation 5 is available for consumers by late 2020, so I guess developers should be able to get their hands on a devkit pretty soon? Do us “normies” have to wait until after the release of the console to start making games for it? Cheers

This information is probably already known by Playstation Devs registered at Sony, since the UE4 dev kit for Playstation is only available for UE4 devs already registered at Sony. Keep in mind also that this subject is under NDA while the console is not out and you won’t heard anything outside Sony’s appropriate channels. Epic won’t give information here since they are also under NDA.

It probably already works on the new consoles, but would need some API updates for their features and services. But yeah, you’ll have to contact Sony/Microsoft to work with them if you want to develop something for those new consoles, otherwise you’ll have to wait for more info

That’s awesome, I can’t wait to see what them graphics will look like :slight_smile:

Most likely not very different than what you see nowadays, it all boils down to art direction, unfortunately these days I can’t tell a newly released game from the one 6 years ago. For instance the last of us 2 still looks better than most games coming out today and I wasn’t sure if i were looking at COD modern warfare 1 or 2 when the latest trailer of that upcoming game came out.

So yea, a few extra polys here some more reflections there isn’t cutting it in this generic age of AAA video games, I put my bet on good indie games on a budget and emphasis on art and clever ways around limitations.

When a boss fight at the end of “inside” had me scratching my head in awe from both technical and artistic point of view than any AAA super budget I played since then, goes to say a lot.

[USER=“202133”]William K[/USER] Yeah but then again I think PS5 will support “technology” that the PS4 simply isn’t capable of doing today, such as:

  • Ray tracing/casting
  • 8K video and gameplay
  • 16K+ textures
  • HDR/Rec 2100
  • 120 FPS
  • Faster load times
  • Better AI?
  • Larger maps?
  • More players at the same time?
  • More detailed characters and animations

Of course there’s not going to be enough power to run all these features at the same time. But I think these things listed above are some of the improvements over PS4 that can be used when making video games for PS5 using UE4.

Maybe 1080p upscaled to 8K ? Or 2K upscaled to 8K ? I doubt it will manage to upscale 4K rendering to 8K mantaining the framerate.

The Nvidia 2080Ti is the bare minimum for 8K gameplay usually disabling many filters to speed it up.

4K is upscaled and 8K out of question, No way any game will run on 8K unless you a rendering cubes maybe.

True 2K will run 60 FPS stable if it is well optimized for good visual heavy polished games.

Also that list is mostly just marketing talk. And it certainly does not mean that games automatically will start looking better, I told you it all depends on art direction. but in terms of hardware itself of course PS5 ill be stronger than 4, that is a given. But then again I already am running more than PS5 feature on my 4 year old PC and I haven’t seen any drastic change in visual quality since.

[USER=“202133”]William K[/USER] I certainly wouldn’t call those things “marketing talk” when it makes gameplay much better, especially option for 120 FPS. And the reason you don’t see drastic changes in your old PC is because the PC market is tiny compared to the console market. A lot of PC games are console ports as well, meaning they get very little changes compared to the console version. Many game developers also wait to upgrade their in-house game engine until after the new generation of consoles are out in order to take advantage of the increased capabilities a new console gives them. They are then suddenly not constrained by the weaker hardware and bottlenecks that the previous systems had. But it’s still too early to tell. The PS5 isn’t out until about a year from now.…mes-take-half/

As you can see the mobile market generates the highest revenues. The console market and PC gaming market are almost equal revenues wise. So thinking that the PC gaming market is a tiny thing compared to consoles is just far from true.

Mobile market is not really a market anymore it belongs to the 1% who own 99% of the revenue. If you don’t have 100’s of millions to advertise your game these days you better pray to get lucky.

That could be said for PC gaming too then because big software houses with AAA titles get most of the revenue obviously with their massive marketing campaigns that poor solo indie developers as well as tiny and small to average software houses just can’t afford.
And for the consoles market most indie developers can’t afford the publishing fees to just sign up until having got some profit out of either just the first one or a few games depending on luck with sales.
Most indies will always be the small fish in the water full of big sharks. But if no one succeeded in making money the whole indie market would have collapsed many years ago already. If more and more people start the indie adventure either solo or with creating a tiny business to enter the market then it means that it is still possible to make money. Real revenues and profits data is not public, some stats are public to let people get a clue about what is a success and what is not but a few developers complaining on some forums on the 'net, not talking about this one but others, don’t make the truth, also there is absolutely no proof about who is speaking the truth about revenues and profits and who is not. But if the market was impossible for indies then indies would have disappeared, no one would keep using Unity, UE4 and other 3D engines to make games, no one would make apps of any kind either. Not all mobile apps are made by big software houses, far from that.

The amateur hobbyist or videogames student scene is vibrant. Not sure that’s much of an indicator of the wider economic reality though. See if any of this rings true in your own personal stories right now… How many pro-Indie game developers do people know on here that are actually killing it? I know 2-5 that are doing ok, out of a possible 100 or so, that are making less than is comfortable to live off. The ones doing well are still worried about getting their future projects discovered too.

Its not just game developers struggling though. There’s a wider problem of discoverability outside of game dev. Look at other forms of the arts. Its interesting how even legends of cinema such as Coppola / Scorsese etc, are lamenting about how tough it is to get their films recognized after being drowned out by the marketing war engines of the marvel industrial complex. One consolation though, is that Spotify-indie-musicians and YT-indie-content-creators are having an even worse time… :stuck_out_tongue:

Every creative industries suffer from the same problems.

The problem isn’t really marketing powerhouses, if you want to make a living as a “creator” of any kind then technology is your worst enemy even if you use technology yourself to create whatever you want to sell.


While this is partly true, I wouldn’t personally count on those games to make the profits they are looking for, most of them if not all are considered “very artsy games” very very very “niche market space” with small audience, this is something to take into consideration. I don’t mean any disrespect for those games at all I just wish to see numbers from games that fall more into your everyday genres.

[USER=“434”]BrUnO XaVIeR[/USER]

I would also say Greed, but hey that seems to be human nature to some people and deep rabbit hole in history. I would still put much of the blame on lack of proper curation by these stores I mean mostly by Steam. For years I’ve been saying this and Steam supposedly tried to fix it. Just create a section for Curated and non curated games and be done with it if they don’t want to go down the sensitive path of choosing.

Take Steam and turn back the clock 10 to 15 years when all these tech engines weren’t readily available to your average 10 to 15 year old (no offense) who could care less about world responsibilities and just spit out ten whatever looks like “video games” a week on steam and other similar platforms and clutter up the space for some of us working years to get a proper product out. Then you will see a good balance.

Yea sure some would argue “but if you are working that long on a game you would certainly have marketing money for it and so you have nothing to worry about”. Wrong.

I agree with you that tech is also your enemy as soon as UE4 got introduced and Unity matured in 2014 simultaneously the Steam submissions went up dramatically in just 2 years.

The amount of utter rubbish on steam is mind boggling, and it is a shame because it really hurts the industry badly.


Not true, Mobile markets are like the casinos of the video game industry, your chances of making any profit or visibility are like 0.1%. As an investment it is pure chance unless you are willing to put more money than it took to make your game for marketing and even that is questionable, if you have that amount or not.

In PC or Console markets you will have at least 50/50 or 25/50 chance of visibility and good sale to break even or making profit if your game is above average good to start with. The market is not nearly as flooded yet and some stores are curated and others can provide marketing with far less the amount you would be paying to market in the mobile market. There is also a far more dedicated active community and loyal customer base if they like your company/product.

Also 75% of all mobile market revenue comes from china/Asia, you should take that into consideration when making your games and aiming for a target audience. Also 99% of these revenues are monopolized by mega corporations from MMO’s and candy crushes with billions of dollars to spare all operating in the same market space. Taking the target audience of mobile gamers a very large percentage flock to these games only and disregard most others, because mobile gaming is not really “gaming” in the full sense of the word, it is time spent on a casino machine for a few minutes then interrupted then spent again quickly on a bus and then put aside.

In the console PC markets big corps still amount to lesser percentage. There is a Large indie dev market out there sometimes competing, and most aren’t in the same space, Large corps have their own market spaces such as Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard and gamers are gamers they would want to play your next story driven indie game as much as your next COD. The audience is very very different.

Read through this entire article, then went and did research on all the games. All of these games are point click and touch style simple mechanic art games. They each describe their blunders, as well. One overpriced their game at 9.99 on a mobile market, another didn’t advertise at all, several used publishers, and asked for loans. Spending profit before its even earned. There are three indie devs in that list that did well. One said he made over 100k, the others they never said how much. But if you do quick research you can see that their trailers have hundreds of thousands of views, and their games all got ported to each of the consoles. They also spoke in a much more positive manner about the experience.

The people who were negative about it listed their incomes as being low, but they each claimed to have earned several tens of thousands through loans, government plans and other investment sources.

This article is actually very inspiring to anyone making games for bigger audiences. If these people in dire situations making games from a minimal audience with very small teams can make enough success to get by, then people that have planned ahead can do it even better. One of the indie devs made a game where you sit on a boat and it floats along a river into random scenes. That’s it. He claims to be making 1-2k per steam sale off of that. To me that is absolutely amazing.

“This is why I’m cautious about telling my story. I don’t think I made good decisions.” -JASON ROBERTS, MAKER OF GOROGOA
A quote from the article above, if you follow his story, it’s a success story. He got signed on to publisher. These people that were interviewed made terrible decisions and still got by and more than a third succeeded(making livable wage or more).

It seems to me like its a very viable pathway to take. These articles are shaped deceptively, it doesn’t report much about the success but is detailed in the negative aspects which are purely based on each individuals living situation. Be careful when reading stuff like this, it is setup like this on purpose, media loves to play on emotions.