It's the same thing as why don't they make the Unreal Engine 3 run on the 3DS?  I can never find a sufficient answer to this question given that the 3DS can run an equally as good (or better) engine perfectly fine.

That's a pretty good question too, you know.

I think there's a technical reason for that, the engine requiring programmable shaders but the 3DS offering a fixed set of hardware functions?

It still doesn't make any sense at all because Epic said that the 3DS "isn't powerful enough."  They didn't say anything about programmable shaders or anything.  Not only that, but I don't even know how that really does anything because the engines are made for the specific hardware in many cases, not the other way around.

Epic is going to get burned once they realize that no one cares about the 720 / ps4 (except for fanboys on the web & in their circles). The economy stinks, no one is gonna buy an overpriced console which barely looks better than the current gen. PC gaming has the same problem- it's far too expensive to be mass-market. Plus, nowadays these games need to sell like 5-10 million units to break even (thanks to expensive shit like unreal engine). More companies will go under. Sony will probably fold up. Nintendo will still be going strong as usual. Just watch.

Here's the relevant quotation:

"There's only so much time in the day; our engine requires a certain level of hardware capabilities to make our pipeline, our tools work - and we work on the ones that do," vice president Mark Rein told Joystiq at the Game Developers Conference.

"The second Nintendo releases a piece of hardware that can run our engine well, we'll be on it like water on fish."

"There's nothing against Nintendo," Rein continued. "I hate that people somehow think that's the case.

"If we felt it could run [Unreal Engine] and deliver the kind of experience people license our technology to build, we'd be on [the 3DS]."

As you can see, he did not simply state "it's not powerful enough", which would be a rough judgment on the overall results you can get from the 3DS. He said that it lacks some capabilites that are vital to their tools set, meaning that it would require too much resources for them to adapt the engine.

Engines and toolsets are not rewritten from scratch for each platform: they are sets of many coupled, modular pieces of code. Your goal is to make it so you can port it to a platform by rewriting the minimum. If a missing hardware feature would require you to rewrite too much of that codebase, it becomes a bad business venture.

And yes, he does not name shaders, but that was the opinion of many commentators when comparing the 3DS with the (supported) iPhone 3gs: the most glaring difference was the iPhone sporting an OpenGL shaders API for its GPU.

Honestly that doesn't make very much sense at all.  It still begs the question on why the phones/tablets are getting them at all.  If it wont be really anything much different than the UE3, why are the phones getting what's called the UE4?  Also, the message that is being sent by Epic isn't the italics but that "Wii U is underpowered and can never run the UE4."  That's what people are going to think because it's exactly how they're saying it.

Because Nintendo can... well... do something to them! Something horribly bad!

(If they bought Third Party studios and those studios really don't like them, they'll just leave and create a new studio. Even though that is extremely childish.)

The entire premise that nintendo can continue being an unhealthy, uncompetitive, uninvestable company for the next "50 years" just because they have 10billion in the bank --that premise is delusional lol.

Having 10billion in the bank is great. It's definitely a great thing. In no way is it a real world barometer or representation of nintendo's current situation or ability to compete in the market. Interesting that 10 billion hasn't garnered nintendo third party support, successful hardware sales, or respect from devs and fans alike. I'm noticing developers apparently laughing at wiiu. Or maybe epic scoffed at them, who knows.

Stop parroting the same cliche line about 10 billion in the bank. That money is clearly not intended for a 50 year nosedive strategy lol. If you're so "in the know" go ahead and explain why they've been so unsuccessful with their strategy for so long and why they don't seem to care about spending any of that money to bring their hardware UP TO DATE.

Im sure you didn't just read the headline and rock yourself to sleep now did you? That would would be such a shame -- reacting to a headline without taking the time to THINK.

I believe that quote came after he made the comment, but I cannot be too sure.

However it is very likely that they're just making excuses because I don't know what UE3 has that MT Frameworks doesn't that makes it so difficult to make at least the version the phones use to put the UE3 on it.  You're bringing up the programmable shaders, but I'll just come right out and say I have no idea what that means or how that seriously impacts the capability of making an engine work on a piece of hardware.  Especially since the 3DS is such a big system now (sales wise), I don't know why the resources wont be worth using since it really can't be that much of a big deal.