The Nintendo Switch release is almost upon us and with that means lots of new games will be coming in the next few years hopefully. There are plenty of engines that said games could be running on, and it sounds like Nintendo’s development teams have been working with many Western engines, with them supposedly having mastered the Unreal Engine.
Shigeru Miyamoto spoke in front of a group of company’s investors and explained how the development team behind the Switch designed it to where development would be the easiest.
Courtesy of VentureBeat, we got some details of that discussion. Miyamoto explained how it should be rather easy for a team to port a game from PC over to the Nintendo Switch due to the system’s Nvidia graphics technology, as well as their full support for both the Unreal and Unity engines.
In addition, he felt that working with the Unreal Engine has helped Nintendo themselves, which he have explained in the following excerpt.
“That ease of software development has also been felt by Nintendoʼs internal developers. 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.”
The Unreal Engine has certainly been a huge part of Western development since Epic Games introduced it, with Unreal Engine 4 being the most current of the bunch. Miyamoto didn’t specifically state that Nintendo would be using that engine for their own internal games, but it is definitely good to see that they have gotten some experience with it themselves in the event of working together with Western developers on a game.
