While the announcement that the Unreal 4 Engine is in development isn't anything new, Epic Games president Michael Capps' has revealed a rough release date for the technology. Speaking at Gamefest in Seattle, Capps talked about the engine's development and said that it won't come out until the next generation of consoles.
"We've got Unreal [Engine] 4 in production right now," Capps said. "It's going to be in the next console generation—our rough guess is 2012 [to] 2018." The reason for this long production track is because Epic doesn't intend for it to be used on this generation of consoles. This was shown by Epic's Tim Sweeney when he was talking about the engine to TG Daily: "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."
However, Sweeney's interview also revealed that Epic hasn't dedicated a large workforce to the new engine yet. "We have a small Research & Development effort dedicated to the Unreal Engine 4," Sweeney said. "Basically, it is just me, but that team will be ramping up to three to four engineers by the end of this year—and even more one year after that."
