| JEMC said:
It could be something close to what Smilebeast, albeit less dramatic. Simply put, Epic wants/needs to sell their new engine and to do that, they need to show what their new engine can do and powerful machines that allow them do show it. The best platforms for that are Microsoft and Sony's new consoles, and they need them to be as powerful as possible. How? Well, for instance they have said numerous times what kind of hardware they want (specially with RAM), but so far the leaked specs suggest that neither PS4 nor the nextbox will something like a GTX 680. So they go a little further and say that they won't support WiiU with UE4, that for the power it has UE3 is still good. This is a message to Sony/Microsoft. It's a last try to force them to beef up their machines because Epic knows that they want to be able to say "we can run UE4". I don't know how it will end, but if WiiU does well, I wouldn't be surprised if Epic announced UE4 for it about 1 year after its launch, once the other consoles have their specs confirmed. |
But part of the draw of UE is it's scalability, they have already said that UE4 will be scaled down to phones and tablets albeit without a lot of the fancy bells and whistles. Tho they haven't confirmed that it's comming to any existing mobile platforms so they may be waiting for some more advanced tech, such as some DX11 class hardware with compute shaders and tesselation support I guess. The next iteration of Tegra from Nvidia does promise DX11 support. So I guess it is possible that how it's architected now UE4 requires DX11 class hardware at a minimum and any port to a platform without a DX11 class GPU will need a new renderer which makes sense and also explains why Epic havn't announced any platforms other than PC for UE4 so far.
It also makes sense to have that split while keeping UE3 around to support older platforms, which is why they are pushing UE3 for Wii U and why Infinity blade dungeons is not UE4.
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