Iwata on Unreal Engine 4, Third Party Announcements for Wii U

The man behind Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, was recently quizzed on the third party approach to Wii U, and if the system would be able to run Unreal Engine 4 eventually.

The Independent Newspaper recently sat down with Nintendo president to discuss the Wii U and upcoming 3DS XL, and one of the aspects touched upon was the third party support.

Despite having a comprehensive catalogue of first and third party titles to get started when the system arrives this fall, there has been a lack of certain franchises and key players from the system. Some, like EA have promised announcements later this year, and others have kept schtum.

Iwata has highlighted that not all projects have been touched upon, and certain third party games will be announced when Nintendo finally confirms a release date and price-point for Wii U.

Obviously before making the Wii U public we had to proactively go out to those third-party publishers because otherwise we would never have something for the launch of our system.??

I think some of these projects have already been announced at E3, but there are other games in the works that haven’t been announced yet and in the autumn, when we announce price point and timing of the launch, we will also be able to announce some more third-party titles.

Iwata was also asked about the potential ability to approach Epic Games on hosting the forthcoming Unreal Engine 4 on the new system to ensure that third parties using the technology to port their titles to the Wii U.

I think that the Wii U will be powerful enough to run very high spec games but the architecture is obviously different than other consoles so there is a need to do some tuning if you really want to max out the performance.

We’re not going to deliver a system that has so much horsepower that no matter what you put on there it will run beautifully, and also, because we’re selling the system with the GamePad, which adds extra cost to the package - we don’t want to inflate the cost of each unit by putting in excessive CPU power.