Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney 'absolutely thrilled' about upcoming PS4 Neo and Xbox Scorpio

The gaming industry may still be fiercely debating the possible end to the traditional console cycle with the announcement of new, more powerful hardware on the way, but several game developers have voiced their enthusiasm about the upcoming PlayStation 4 Neo and Xbox One Scorpio. In an interview with Eurogamer, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has said he is "absolutely thrilled" about the new upgrades and the prospect of a new console cycle.

"It gives you the best of both worlds," Sweeney said. "The upgrade cycle of the PC which ensures that people always have access to the latest and greatest hardware and games don't go out of date over a seven-year cycle, together with the fact there's a box you can go and buy - or two boxes - and you're guaranteed that everything can work. And I think the configurations for developers are very reasonable."

He adds that the console industry will be able to better grow and sustain its customer base if it doesn't have to constantly "reset its user base to zero every seven years".

"The idea of throwing everything out and doing everything from scratch every seven years is completely crazy," he said. "And everything Epic's done with our new game development approach, involving these online games we're going to maintain over time, it's about building games where we don't have to reset our user base to zero when we want to add new features."

Considering the fact that both consoles are looking to strengthen their GPU power over that of the CPU, Sweeney notes that it will actually help game developers working on boosting their upcoming games' performance and look.

"As game developers, you can spend far more time doing far more optimisation for CPU than GPU," Sweeney said. "GPU is a perfectly parallel brute force computing device, if you give us a fixed algorithm and tell us to make it two times faster there's not much we can do, you can spend a year making our game run twice as fast."

"If you look at what's going on in the industry, it's still propelling GPU performance growth over CPU performance growth, which is a trend I think is going to continue."

The Epic Games boss, however, is not the only developer excited about the upcoming upgraded consoles. Take-Two, EA and Ubisoft executives have also come out to voice their enthusiasm about the PS4 Neo and Xbox Scorpio as well.

After months of intense speculation, rumours and leaks, Microsoft is looking to release the Xbox Scorpio towards the end of 2017, touting it as "the most powerful console ever made".

Sony, on the other hand, only confirmed the existence of its Neo console just before E3 2016 without providing any additional details about its specs or potential release date so far. Some analysts say that a slimmed-down version of the PS4 could be revealed at September's Tokyo Game Show.