Exact tech specs is not the point.  Epic doesn't make games, their main product is the Unreal Engine and so they need tech demoes, which happen to be games.  And Epic has set itself up as a premium middleware developer, they make the biggest, baddest engine, and license it to anyone who wants to make the biggest, baddest games, and collect the biggest baddest premiums on it.

The problem with being king of the hill, is that there are others who are constantly playing catch-up, and if you sit around, someone will surpass you.  When they put UE3 on the HD consoles, they skipped the Wii, not because the Wii couldn't handle some iteration of UE, but because other companies had enough skill to create their own Wii engines to compete against UE.  On the HD side, while other companies were making higher end engines that would eventually catch up to UE3, Epic had a virtual monopoly on top of the line graphics for a few years; but now that competitors have caught up, Epic wants to see new hardware so they can make Unreal Engine 4, and move into premium territory again.

When the iPhone came out, Epic saw that as the high end of portable devices and made an Unreal Engine for it, looking to be the king of the hill there, holding a monopoly on high end portable graphics before everyone else can get out there and make their own high-end iPhone engines.  The 3DS isn't trying to be the latest and greatest in handheld technology, so like the Wii, there is enough expertise out there for other companies to make top of the line 3DS engines (like Capcom's MT Mobile); there's too much potential competition for Epic to stand out, so they avoid it.

Epic's whole raison d'être is not to be in the biggest pond, it's to be the biggest fish period, even if it means being in the smallest pond.

Well, let's hope someday their pond squeeze them out :)

I understand that people are annoyed about this fact but for me personally it comes down to the fact that they're not offering anything that I want. There are already plenty of other developers on board with the 3DS, so Epic's opinion, informed or not, doesn't really hold much interest for me.

am i the only one who thinks it is a good thing if the 3DS is not all powerful?

all we would get would be quick and easy 3D enabled ports of current gen games, without any kind of innovation, because that would be the easiest and cheapest route to go for developers.

YES!!!

Finally it's reality. I was starting to worry since all this hype continued without some complaints...but after the conference we have 2 points to say that Nintendo, for another gen, i domed! Firstly the price, too high, no one will buy a console which costs as much as half an iPhone!!

And, secondly, Epic games aren't porting their engine to the console...how can we survive without them??

Nintendo is domed, I knew it was impossible to have a gen with them winners! Oh wait...

We'll get them anyway and tons of shovelware as well.

Business-wise as I see it situation is as follows. Japanese devs gladly jumped on board since they have experience of developing for handhelds and have more close relationships with Nintendo overall since they (Nintendo) are dominant there (even more dominant than worldwide), while Nintendo more willingly approached japanese devs specifically (maybe they'll try harder with western devs afterwards) again due to more close relationships.

Western devs have missed handheld boat to some extent though they've tried with PSP thanks to Sony efforts, but as we've seen PSP undelivered. So they've jumped on smartphones (and DS) instead when technology and what's more important stable business models to monetize their efforts were implemented (btw I find this situation interesting, Japan have reputation of more mobile-centric nation than anyone, and still despite of all doom and gloom for handhelds from certain western journalists, Apple fanboys and gadgeteers, they have a sizeable market for handheld games that co-exits with mobile gaming... ok, back on topic).

Though I'm not saying that support that western devs (both indie and big ones) gave to smartphones is anything special and different from what they've been feeding us on DS/PSP, but they definately find AppStore-like marketplace a pleasing experience and produced  a hell of a lot of games for it. Until now higher tier games were exceptions on mobiles and handhelds, but with more unification between home consoles/PCs and handhelds/mobiles thanks to middlewares like UE3 we may see more cost-efficient development of high tier games for high-end market that at the moment exist on X360 and PS3 en masse.

It's up to debate if the market needs this kind of games, this gen (as well as previous ones) has proofed that a) third parties not necessarily have a better understanding of mainstream consumer so appealing to third parties do not equal a good business strategy; b) console-like experience that I've just described proofed to be not sufficient to establish oneself at handheld market (PSP), home consoles just canniblize handheld games sales; c) do this industry really needs yet another one radical bump of costs now on handheld front? instead of more healthy wide range of budgets from lowest to highest (3DS will suffer if it leaves low-end to mobiles entirely and Nintendo won't experiment with what they call 'expanded audience' once again).

Don't quite understand why people here think that Mark rein or Epic themselves have some kind of bias or dislike towards the 3ds.

Epic has always aimed to showcase its engine and in order to do so they have to use the most high end consoles available at the time.

They are in the industry to make money and have been very successful so far at what they do.

A lot of people on these forums act as though 3rd parties should cater to Nintendo instead of the other way round. If Nintendo want high end developers to make games for their consoles then clearly they need to meet them half way at least.

Personally I think Mark Rein just made an observation based on his considerable experience in the industry and this is being blown way overboard.

I'm sure you would understand if he had said the PSP2 couldn't run UE3.

Sure, it's a lot faster, but having to read more often from it is anyway a heavy performance hit compared to RAM speed. And if the game was designed to load in RAM a given amount of game level's data, porting to a machine with less RAM forces to some rewriting in the part of the engine that loads those data, as simply changing settings like it happens in PC games engines would simply reduce image detail and quality and viewing distance on the console with less RAM. If the game is set in wide open spaces, to keep the same viewing distance it can be necessary some heavier tweaking. Low res may allow to be fine with less graphics RAM, but it affects a lot less main RAM requirements, the engine code keeps the same size, the levels most abstract description layers too, RAM requirements reduction applies when it comes to detail of objects and background, the number of polygons used to show them, and from there on, all the graphics pipeline, so, as I wrote, the biggest requirements reduction applies to graphics RAM, GPU power and storage memory size (textures and everything else related to graphics detail will be smaller), followed by CPU power that can be lower too, having to generate a less detailed description from the abstract one.

Obviously an exclusive game, written for 3DS from the start, won't have such problems.

But anyway, maybe the rumours about RAM being just 64MB aren't true, so there won't be any problem to make ports of PC, PS3 and XB360 games.

I will laugh if Epic ends up making games for the freakin Iphone of all things but not the 3DS. Talk about going to the wrong market!