Wii U Ports?

[Mnementh]

MaxwellAllen said:

Look, the questions that need to be answered are:

1. Why is EPIC not bothering to do it themselves, as opposed to fully supporting PS4/Xbax970

2. How much time would it take for a dev to do this on their own. (Additional time with no additional cost --no way that's accurate)

3. Why would a developer bother with a wiiu. (We don't know the number of units needed to sell in order to make a marginal profit on wiiu --I'm guessing very low)

Why epic made this choice is the big question though. If they really gave a shit, they wouldn't be dumping it on random devs to do with as they please. That's a big red flag.

1. In this thread someone said, that Epic needs to make UE4 different from UE3 for marketing reasons, they also want to sell UE3. but the most important reason in my opinion is simple business: Nintendo has more supportfrom japanese devs than from western devs. Western devs are more likely to license UE4 than japanese devs. UE is optimized for the typical experiences western devs tend to deliver. So the probability for Epic is higher to sell UE4 on PS4 and Nextbox then on WiiU.

2. Harder to answer. Typical programming is not much of a work for developing a game, but that often means using an established engine. If you want to port the engine that would be considerably more work, even doing it bad. And to make it worse, I think Epic is optimizing the engine over the time. So it is a moving target. I think that porting is a lot of work. It may happen if a lot of devs want a WiiU-port from Epic,  but I wouldn't expect that.

3. If the developer is using UE4, porting to WiiU will be more expensive as if he uses a engine that is supported on all target-platforms. How much more work involved is a good question. Generally a port should be cheap, I would think not more of 10% of initial development. In the case of the WiiU the gamepad is involved. If they only have the option to put the game on the gamepad or put some menus on it, I think it will be very cheap. The Nintendo-devkit probably supports all this out of the box. To create a unique experience with the gamepad might be more expensive.