Nintendo’s unique selling point has always been its proprietary titles – the international hits of Mario and Zelda, plus the likes of Donkey Kong, Kirby, Star Fox, and Splatoon – but the Wii U, its previous console, certainly suffered from a dearth of third-party games. The Japanese company is hoping that the Switch, its forthcoming home/portable hybrid console, will usher in a change and begin to attract developers to work with Nintendo. One key component of that strategy, according to Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto, is its approach to third-party development tools. One such tool is the Unreal Engine, a system which, Miyamoto claims, has been “mastered” by Nintendo engineers.
“That ease of software development has also been felt by Nintendoʼs internal developers,” Miyamoto told investors during a Q&A in Kyoto (via VentureBeat). “Also, even though game software developers in the U.S. and E.U. are often said to have superior skills to their Japanese counterparts when it comes to software development techniques, Nintendoʼs software developers have mastered state-of-the-art technologies such as Unreal engine, and their skills can now be compared with those of Western developers. Our developers are more excited than ever to create software.”
While this does not mean that Nintendo will now adopt Unreal, or other third-party engines, to make its own games, its work with the software will help other developers make games for its new console.
“For our previous game platforms, creating our own development tools was a high priority for us,” Shinya Takahashi, General Manager of Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning & Development Division, added. “However, since the start of Nintendo Switch development, we have been aiming to realize an environment in which a variety of different third-party developers are able to easily develop compatible software, such as by making it compatible with Unreal and Unity as well as our own development tools. As a result, even companies with only a few developers have already started making games for Nintendo Switch.”
The Nintendo Switch is set to be released on 3rd March.
Image courtesy of Forbes.
