It sounds like Rein is saying "we'll leave it up to developers" in reference to the wiiu porting. Does Epic intend to work closely with PS4/Kinectbox, while leaving wiiu support more or less up in the air?

Is that the Situation.

*sigh*  Still focused on nothing but graphics. 

Think of it this way.  Say a developer is building their game using UE4 and want a Wii U version.  What do you think they'd rather do?  Convert it to UE3 and then port or directly develop it alongside the other editions via UE4?  

As for buying an inferior looking port of a game...do you know how lame that arguemnt is?  Is a Wii U owner going to skip a 3rd party game just because it looks better on another platform they don't have?

And games don't sell... *sigh*  Were you really expecting a game console that just launched to have the same software sales figures as a mature ecosystem of ~70 million consoles already?   You're on a website that tracks video game sales, for God's sake.  Use it.   Low software sales are a common factor of every single console launch in the history of video games.   You think the Wii U is unique in this department?   Better yet, do you think the PS4 and Next X are suddenly going to have the same software sales as the PS3 and Next X when they launch?  

As for your BF4 edit, I suppose playing BF3 on a Radeon HD 4670 is a totally different game than on a Radeon HD7850?   That's all the difference you'll see between PS4 and Wii U.  Same game with reduced texture quality/AA/frame rate.  This isn't the Wii which had a vastly different architecture.

I'm going to stop you right there. Developers aren't even going to bother because: A) It's too much hassle. B) Not worth the effort if consumers won't support it. Nintendo fans are not going to pay $60 to have massively downscaled versions of games when they're already raising a stink about things like Arkham City. 

Most developers aren't even bothering to port their freaking current PS3/360 games, no one is going to really give that much of a poop to port Unreal Engine 4 to Wii U. What's the point? The whole point of UE4 is to provide experiences beyond what exists on UE3 centric hardware. Scaling down the engine so far that it can run on PS3/360/Wii U (that it probably ought to be the UE3) is a novelty that a handful of people might care about in actual practice. 

The main point of Unreal Engine 4, whether people want to admit it or not, is to provide graphics engines (which includes physics and not just "ooooh purdy textures") that go far, far beyond Unreal Engine 3. That's the whole point. If you have to downscale the engine so far that it may as well be Unreal Engine 3, then it defeats the purpose. Which is basically what Mark Rein is saying. This is an engine for next-generation consoles, as in consoles with hardware significant hardware leaps beyond PS3/360. Period. 

People just need to get over that already. Nintendo didn't enough of a crap, that's basically all it boils down to. They wanted a chip that was ridiculously small and power efficient. AMD probably easily could've given them something that could properly run UE4 without much fuss, but Nintendo chose not to go that route. Bottom line right there. 

Get back to me when you learn what a game engine is.   Right now, you are so stuck on this graphics only angle.  You're giving zero consideration to the development pipeline at all....which you can be damn sure every single developer is.

To really drive my point home about the graphics not being as much of afactor as you think it is, what game engine did Bioshock 1 and 2 run on?  A modified UE2.5.  Sure didn't look like it, did it?  By the way, several Wii games also used UE2.5.  Sure didn't look like Bioshock, did they?   Ubisoft ported it fist since Epic wasn't going to.  Other companies ported it over as well.  But my point is the engine alone doesn't determine graphics, it's also about the development pipeline and the architecture of the machine itself plays a role too.

Let me ask you.   If you were a developer looking to make gaems across all console and you licensed out UE4.  Would you rather port UE4 to Wii U and then develop all your games natively in UE4 or have to rewrite all your shaders and game code fromk UE4 to UE3 each time for each game?

the original wii was the fastest selling system of all time. Developers saw the $$$$$$...

It should be noted that they had to hire out completely different studios to handle many wii ports and that most AAA titles did infact skip the system (Mass effect, elder scrolls, battlefield, assasins, bioshock...). Wii U is unlikely to offer the same draw of having a userbase stronger then its 2 closest competitors combined, as was the case for majority of the wii's shelf life. Developers will look towards porting to the 360/ps3 before they look to the wii IMO, they will use that as their saftey blanket going into next gen.. porting to the wii U will be the last thing on their mind. Not to say that the wii U won't recieve any ports, but specifically in response to the OP, I doubt it will recieve consistent support.

Edit: But Im sure we agree that the deciding factor is more down to the systems sales, then whether or not UE4 are that bit easier to manage.

If Wii U sells a lot of systems, and games like Watch_dogs sell well, Wii U will get lots of ports, using UE3, UE4 or whatever. If it has no install base and Watch_Dogs bombs, it won't. Simple as that.

Exactly.  With Wii U, they don't don't have to do that.  Porting in-engine would be a breeze that takes all of a few coders a few weeks.  The ROI is high even with low sales.

I don't think some of you grasp just how UE4 simplies and scales game development.

If I was a developer, I honestly wouldn't even bother with a Wii U version period. Business is business and that's the POV I'm actually looking at this from, not from a graphics POV. I'm a Nintendo fan actually, but reality is reality, and if you're talking to me as a businessman with finite resources, the Wii U is probably the platform getting the short end of the stick. 

Graphics have to be part of the discussion though because that is the primary point of Unreal Engine 4, whether you want to admit it or not. 

It's not an engine designed to grow rainbows and butterflys, it's an engine designed by Epic to push the highest fidelity visuals and take advantage of modern GPU architectures. 

Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed bombed on Wii U. I don't see Watch Dogs breaking out. The PS3/360 SKUs will probably sell the best, with PS4/720 picking up some early adopter sales on the PS4/720, then the Wii U version last. 

This is provided the game is even any good to begin with. 

The Nintendo audience wants unique content, not ports. And it's been that way for a long time actually. Which is why all this bruhaha over UE4 on Wii U is silly to begin with. Nintendo fans barely buy multi-plats as is (and this goes back to the GameCube era at least). 

The casual audience only wants dance/party games with the occassional bit of Mario once in a while, but that crowd is thinning out, so the above mentioned Nintendo gamer is primarily what is going to be the Wii U demographic IMO. 

They will do the same as at the Wii: no ports. Exclusives.

 " if 3rd party games never sell well on Nintendo platforms to begin with"

They do, if the dev adjusts to the different audience of Nintendo-consoles. May I point to Just Dance or Zumba.I could say, 3rd-party-games don't sell well on PS360, because obviously JD4 sold much betetr on Wii than on PS360.