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Nintendo's Engineers Have Embraced Unreal Engine (engadget.com)
Tom Regan, writing for Engadget: If there's one thing that Nintendo has struggled with, it's enticing third-party developers to create games for its consoles. But according to VentureBeat, the company is looking to change that with the advent of the new Switch. At an investor Q&A session, Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that Nintendo engineers have been learning how to use third-party development tools like the Unreal Engine. It's not much of a surprise, given that the Switch, like the Wii U before it, supports the Unreal Engine. But the fact that Miyamoto has opened up on the subject shows that Nintendo may be softening its sometimes frosty stance on third-party developers. That relationship has never been too friendly, with former president Hiroshi Yamauchi saying in 2000 that third-parties are "not helping the industry at all."
Nah, that's Id Tech 6.
The Nintendo Switch is unreal.
Chalmers.
Er, what? I've been using Unreal Engine for 2 years now. The entire time I have been told, by the engine itself and the folks around it, that there is no Wii U support. I have certainly not observed any.
Sooo...when did this mystical Wii U support come into being and how can I find it?
Will developers have full or near full access to the hardware, or will that be reserved for Nintendo licensed developers?
Other consoles have tried this, but won't allow the full capabilities to be used by independents.
Payng a 5% on gross however is insane
You motherfucker
Surprised? Not in the least. Wasn't Super Mario Run made in Unity? Yup, Nintendo is doing what other major companies are doing, using existing quality software tools.
Not to mention they opened up to mobile development as well.
It seems Nintendo have finally gotten more friendly with developers.
Maybe we will start to see more of a variety of games from them and 3rd parties over the next few years and beyond.
Hopefully enough to bring in more players they desperately need.
The Wii was a fluke that happened at exactly the right time, hence why Wii U tanked. (removing the Wii, the Wii U had the expected number of buyers from the slowly decaying trend on their total console sales)
All these people were casual players that barely bought the Wii U and were taken up my mobile games just as that explosion happened.
I'd hate to see Nintendo die off.
The article itself makes no effort to sustain this premise. Whatever engine Nintendo uses for 1st party is irrelevant. Sony using in-house engines likewise has no bearing. Miyamoto's apparent concession that Japanese devs lagged behind in technical skills is somewhat interesting, I guess.
This looks like a blog post. msmash, are you kdawson in disguise? Are you completely retarded, or is it just all the gasoline fumes getting to you? I know you huff off that glass full of petrol you keep on your desk.
ACs are now picking comments at random to comment on the summary itself. Why? I don't know!
They weren't helping. I remember. I was there.
A reply to the first top level comment is often much more visible than a new top level comment, so people just post there instead. It's a common issue on all tree-style forum designs.
One of the many reasons I prefer strictly linear and chronological (and unfiltered) comment sorting a la 4chan.
This AC didn't reply to the top comment, but a comment in response to the top comment, though.
Eh, same principle applies in general, but not in this case.
Who knows, the comment system here is pretty terrible and unintuitive to begin with.
Have the finally embraced a reasonable thread model every other console adopted a decade ago?!?
(Last I saw the WiiU still uses yield() with cooperative threads, making it nigh impossible to do a straight port from anything that made reasonable use of a pthread-like API).
This is absolutely not true: 'That relationship has never been too friendly, with former president Hiroshi Yamauchi saying in 2000 that third-parties are "not helping the industry at all."' I'm not familiar with that quote, and I recognize that there's a difference between being friendly towards third parties and getting a lot of third parties developing for your platform. So pointing to the broad support which Nintendo has received for many of its platforms isn't necessarily disproving anything, but I do know that the original NES was created specifically with third party devs in mind - one of the requirements when developing the hardware was that dev kits should cost no more than $100, in order to make it as accessible as possible to outside developers.
Now, that's going back quite a few years, it's true, but so is quoting a company president from 2000, who has been replaced twice since then.
So, based on the new found information, we can assume that Nintendo became tired of themselves developing every game for their proprietary platform and reducing their risk to other individuals.
Cool.