http://www.gamespot.com/events/gdc-2013/story.html?sid=6406190

"Epic Games president says next-gen technology won't be available for developers on Nintendo's latest console."

-----------------------------------

This is an epic disaster (seewhatididthar) considering that 90% of the third party games this gen ran on unreal 3 and the move to unreal 4 I expect to be similar. There is no hope for third party support on this machine now.

Very dissapointing news.

Serious Sam has it's own engine. There are still plenty of developers that don't use Unreal, but it is a dwindling number.

Ravenprose said:

Unfortunately, Serious Sam 3 ran like crap on 360.

I have the frame counter on (look at me) and it averages 30-40 FPS, so I'd think the 360 would be able to handle that. I guess not.  It's all about optimization with these consoles.

Time for a Havok engine revival as there was on the Wii!

Archangel3371 said:

Not surprising and nothing that really bothers me because I'm a multi-console owner and I'm use to buying Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games so third-party games and third-party engines aren't much of a factor for me.

That's kinda the problem for Nintendo.

Foolz said:

Archie and I have successfully destroyed Nintendo's chances this gen.

How much do you read about engines and gaming?

This is Epic - they are here to sell a new engine, part of that is pretending that it won't work on existing consoles and is for da-future.

Here is some info for you, UE3, they stopped improving this a while back and didn't even tailor it to work with Wii U, no further improvements or updates would be released, they've left it to developers to adapt things on a per game basis. That's their attitude right now, they will not rework the engine to take advantage of U's architecture even. So it's not suprising that they won't be making the effort to get UE4 running on U.

However Rein has previously described Unreal Engine 4 as "supremely scalable" and said developers could port games developed using it to the Wii U if they so wished.

It's worth nothing that this was the same approach on Wii where a couple of third parties used UE3 to make a couple of Wii games.

Another point, the UE4 demos they have shown off were running on PCs even more powerful tha PS4, with GPUs twice as powerful with twice the number of teraflops.

The UE4 Infiltrator demo released yesterday for instance was also running on a machine with 16gb of RAM, twice as much as PS4 even.

The UE4 engine will already be downgraded on PS4 and next box. In fact they showed UE4 on PS4 at the conference and it looked so different (worse) that GAF had a whole thread about it. But since you guys don't watch the tech demos and don't read this stuff you wont know about it.

I have to remind people of all the next gen engines that work with the current generation of machines:

• Ubisoft's Disrupt engine (currently making PS4 Watchdogs - made for next gen first then downported)
• Square enix Luminous engine - (making next gen FF?) confirmed to be running on PS3
• Kojima's FOX Engine making Ground Zeros and PP works with current gen
• Cryengine 3 which has been next-gen ready for years works on all current gen platforms as well as next gen and "runs beautifully on Wii U" - Crytek
• Frostbite 3 Engine making Battlefield 4 shown running on a PC GPU twice as powerful as PS4 was scaled back to run on PS3 and 360
• Star Wars 1313 is currently scheduled for current gen though the Lucasarts buyout might have changed that

UE4 not being on Wii U is more to do with Epics unwillingness to do so, not them being incapable of it - they even said that it will be running on smartphones in the next couple of years. If DICE has Frostbite 3 running games on a PC more powerful than next gen and they have scaled it back to current gen. And YET they have not integrated Wii U support into it, it's because they've made a cold hard decision, based as much on business and demographics, projected sales or even backroom fallouts. Not neccesarily based on tech alone. It's no different with Epic games.

It's sad and will impact on 3rd party support for sure, but you should see it as more of a snub and not buy into Reins tech snobbery. He already previously said it was "supremely scalable" and expected it to be on tablets and smartphones.

To quote Rein himself from summer last year:

“I’ll state that I don’t think it’s our intention to bring Unreal Engine 4 to Wii U, but Unreal Engine 4 is going to be supremely scalable. We’ll run on mobile phones and on a wide variety of things, so if a customer decides they want to port an Unreal Engine 4 game to Wii U, they could. But Unreal Engine 3 is a really good fit for that platform.”

So it was never their intention to bring the engine to U in the first place going as far back as before last summer.

EDIT:

Some more info for ya, the Battlefield 4 demo was running on PC at 3K at 60 FPS and still they were able to get it up and working on PS3/360.

What a fucking moron. This guy went out of his way to blast the WiiU and say it wouldn't work and now he says it will. Seriously this guy is fucking stupid.

Foolz said:

GodModeEnabled said:

What a fucking moron. This guy went out of his way to blast the WiiU and say it wouldn't work and now he says it will. Seriously this guy is fucking stupid.

This. At least have some balls and stick to your bullshit.

That's why the games industry is still so immature...because people in charge of important graphics engines and whatnot are themselves immature.

People can downport an UE4 game to anything, it's just that it might not be worth the time, money and effort for most devs considering the compromises the developer would have to made in order to get a working port out of it. Eventually, you're going to wish you had stuck with UE3 anyway. Because of that reason, there's no interest from Epic in offering support for that, as they seem to be focusing on next gen consoles and PC for UE4.