Unreal Engine 4 "will exclusively target the next console generation"

Epic Games' Tim Sweeney has laid it out for PC gamers once again, confirming that his company is focusing on consoles. Sweeney, the company's CEO, stated that Unreal Engine “Version 4 will exclusively target the next console generation, Microsoft's successor for the Xbox 360, Sony's successor for the PlayStation 3 - and if Nintendo ships a machine with similar hardware specs, then that also. PCs will follow after that.”

Few concrete details about the new version of Unreal Engine were released, but Sweeney leads one to believe that UE4 will be coming around 2011-2012, what many believe will be the end of the current hardware cycle.

One thing mentioned in passing is what Sweeney believes will be their most difficult task, “our biggest challenge will be scaling to lots and lots of cores.” Despite the current console configurations, that sounds very PC-oriented to me.