Yeah thats the issue. Everyone says these deals take months to hammer out. So obviously, theyve been at it for a while, even before that UT5 demo. Its pretty obvious that Tim knew this investment was coming from sony.
What else would partners say about each others products? It just makes everything he now says biased.
Edit: Hell, that money coming in was probably a big factor for them making that ps5 UT5 demo.
Things that Sweeney said were:
"The hardware that Sony is launching is absolutely phenomenal. Not only an unprecedented amount of graphics power, but also a completely new storage architecture that blows past architectures out of the water."
Based on the timing, he would have known that
Series X (at least on paper) has more flip flops, more CUs so the PS5 wouldn't really be unprecedented in terms of graphics power. He didn't say "next-generation", he specifically singled out PS5.
Keighley asks:
"
What's your take on... what you're showing here, how is this going to scale to, you know, other systems... will that run on the Xbox Series X (and PC)?"
Epic guy says:
"Unreal Engine is going to run across all of our supported platforms, next generation, current generation as well as mobile devices.
Keighley asks:
"Do you have a sense of how they (PS5 and Xbox Series X) are going to compare in terms of power or... the overall landscape?"
Sweeney says:
"We love all of our babies, and we can't make comparisons or pick favorites"
If you watch back,
you'll notice how (if I remember correctly) the guys at Epic never once mentioned the words 'Xbox' or 'Xbox Series X' during that interview. It's almost like it was a list of taboo words that Sony PR had told them not to use. It's totally fine if they have a marketing deal with Sony ($250m is a pretty lucrative marketing deal) but everything Sweeney said after the fact suggested that it was just their genuine views not money-filtered.
Disclaimer:
inb4 "Xbox butthurt fanboy" - No I'm not an Xbox fanboy. I'm most likely getting PS5. I just like to call out bullshit
I even made an entire thread shitting on the Inside Xbox stream.