Next Gears may be on next-gen consoles

Update: Epic Games president Michael Capps claims he misspoke during a Q&A session at the Tokyo Game Show today when he said, "If there were a next Gears of War, that will be for the next console generation, whenever that is."

Speaking to Eurogamer after the event, Capps explained that if the next Gears of War - assuming there is one - were to be released in the next "four to five years", it would be for current consoles.

Were it to be based on Unreal Engine 4, however, it would have to come out on the next round of consoles, because those are the machines for which Epic is targeting its next generation of money-spinning engine technology.

"If we ship a game in the next few years, it'll be Unreal Engine 3. If we ship a game on next [generation] consoles, it will likely be Unreal Engine 4," he told Eurogamer.

Original Story: Epic Games president Michael Capps has said that if there's a third Gears of Wars game, it will be released on next-gen consoles.

Capps' comments came in a Q&A session following his speech at the Tokyo Game Show. He began by confirming that Epic has been working on Unreal Engine 4 for the past seven years in preparation for the next hardware generation.

"We're very concerned that the next generation will be massively parallel and most engines won't be able to adapt for that," said Capps.

"If there were a next Gears of War, that will be for the next console generation, whenever that is. If someone knows, please tell me! That's about four or five years away, I think."

Also during the session, Capps said that it cost less to make Gears of War 2 than the original game. Although the team working on the sequel was larger, the development time was shorter. "We've managed to keep our expenses down significantly," he said. "We hear about 25 million dollar game budgets and that sort of thing... Epic's not like this."

According to Capps, around 50 or 60 Epic staff members work on each game - compared to reports of around 400 for Assassin's Creed. "It's a great game and it's very big," he said, "But we try to keep focused on a smaller game with lots of quality."

Capps went on to observe that producing its own engine gives both Epic and other companies an advantage. "Every game developer wishes they had time to invest in better tools... We invest a lot in making our content teams more effective, and we can do that because we're making hundreds of other teams effective too."