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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."
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.
The 5% gross fee is only after the first $3000 made per quarter. Also this royalty fee is only for the free version of unreal engine that has no monthly/upfront cost. Epic offers alternative licensing schemes if a developer would prefer to pay upfront for UE4 instead of paying a 5% royalty. https://www.unrealengine.com/c...
The Wii U is supported by UE3. There's a bunch of UE3 games on the platform.
Armature was planning to port UE4 to the Wii U to release Bloodstained, but it seems like they're going to drop that and replace it with the Switch since the Wii u will have been long discontinued by the time it comes out.
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.