That means no shitty looking games on wiiu :)

Well the samaritan demo did run on UE3, the WiiU will support Cryengine3 and Frostbite engine 2 so it will still run great graphics.

You make a great point. It's possible that we'll still see some great graphics outta the Wii-U with those engines in mind. We just might  not see the uber high-end UE4 graphics.

Honestly, I doubt it would run on 720/PS4 unless they make their consoles super expensive

That is true. Gamers that hope any of the next generation consoles could really use UE4 will be desperately disappointed.

graphics aren't the only thing that UE4 improves tho, most of the improvements are on the tools side bringing it up to spec with CE3 for things like live editing and fully realtime lighting which makes game development easier and faster plus features like new intergrated physics and destruction tech which makes UE4 important. Especially for cross platform games. If the Wii U doesn't support UE4 it will mean a lot of multiplatform games won't make it to he Wii U as they would have to switch to a seperate engine for Wii U, something that most devs won't want to do. Most devs will want to use the engine with the vastly superior tools to make their games.

I would be very surprised if Epic did not support the Wii U with UE4 in some way personally even if that means a lot of features aren't available on Wii U, one of the big advantages of UE3 right now is the fact that it scales from phones right up to high end PC. Unless their plan is for UE4 to be phased in after 5 years (bad for business) they will want to get it running on as many platforms as possible.

The only reason for Epic not to support the Wii U would be if UE4 is built from the ground up for compute shader architecture which was added in DX11 spec GPUs (doesn't mean the system has to have DX API just the DX11 API required a certain GPU features so most GPUs since have used those features) unfortunately for the Wii U rumour has it it has a RV700 class GPU that lacks support for DX11 spec and it would be far to late to make such a drastic change to Wii U hardware so if the engine does require those more advanced GPU feeatures Epic may not have the choice of supporting the Wii U without basically building a whole new renderer. 

That's completely true but are you sure UE4 will be the completely dominant engine for next-generation consoles? You seem to know this kind of stuff much better than me so I'm genuinely curious.

Back in 2005/2006 the UE3 was the only viable option (I guess) for developers to have an high-end graphics engine, unless they wanted to develop it internally. The only other option was the IdTech 4, which wasn't nearly as good.

Now, it seems to me, there is more competition thanks for Cryengine 3, IdTech 5 and the likes, also it seems to me more publishers are starting to develop their own engine, like Frostbite for EA, Kojima engine for Konami, MT framework 2 for Capcom, etc.etc.

Nothing is certain but it has the strongest position as it is used in most teaching institutions (Epic were good at giving it to them and providing support) plus most people working in the industry today are familiar with the engine and it's tools etc, plus a lot of developers have brought 5+/3+ year/game licenses to the engine. Cryengine is basically the only real competitior right now as it matches UE for features and actually exededs UE on some areas, is actively supported etc, but from what I have read from developers (mostly indies etc) is that Crytech don't have the same level of suppot as Epic does, and the documentation and guids are not up to the level UE offers. UE has a huge development community and Tim Sweeney (lead engine architect for UE) is aprently very active in it. 

Engines like ID tech, MT Framework, Fox engine, Frostbyte etc are prepriatary so only internal developers can use them so while they may reduce UE's marketshare by having big internal games being built on those engines, they are not really directly competing with UE and will never overtake UE for marketshare. And for an interesting example CAPCOM are so protective of MT Framework that they won't even let external developers making games for them use it, for example Lost Planet 3 will be an UE3 game as it's an external dev same with DMC another UE3 CAPCOM game.

There is Unity which has a big indie following as it allows easy cross platform development (supports iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, linux, Vita, PSP, 3DS, Wii, PS3, X360, Flash, web browser) and is very cheap for licensing. But it lacks a lot of advanced features at the moment and will likely fall behind further after UE4, CE4 etc are released next gen. 

Aha, thanks for your patience at explaining.

NP, I like talking about this stuff, I am a tech nerd lol.

Now back to the Binding of Isaac, which is now even better with the new DLC BTW.