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.
Epic Games already confirmed that the upcoming Switch console supports the powerful Unreal graphics toolkit, but now Nintendo claims it has experimented and mastered the engine itself.“
That ease of software development has also been felt by Nintendoʼs internal developers,” Told Miyamoto.“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.”
“For our previous game platforms, creating our own development tools was a high priority for us,” managing executive officer Shinya Takahashi told investors. “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.”
This likely means that Nintendo won’t make the next game on Unreal, but instead it has the technical know-how to aid third-party studios that need help getting certain tricks to work in the graphics engine.