Epic is graphics driven. The Wii is not. They are incompatible.

As games concentrate less on graphics and more on social interactions and interfaces, Epic will become obselete.

Bye bye Epic.

That's because Nintendo doesn't hype 10 games into the future. They only hype one set of games at a time. Once Mario Kart and Wii Fit are out of the way, they'll get ready to announce their holiday releases (probably at E3). The Wii sells on current games, not future games.  Nintendo prefers not to announce things years before release.  The exception to this rule is at a console's launch...

As far as why people are buying the system, obviously to play games. The Wii outsold the PS3 and 360 combined in worldwide software this week, and with far less hardware. Like it or not, the Wii is taking over all facets of video game sales. Obviously people are turning it on more often than their PS3s and 360s. Either that, or people are buying games just to stick them on a shelf. Either way, what's it matter? The Wii sells the most hardware, the most software, and costs the least to develop for.

 This is because Nintendo stated last year they will be keeping a shorter window on info releases.  They recently stated that E3 will reveal the Winter line up.

This is how they will operate from now on.  Game data will be unvelied by biannual events.

 I disagree 100% Epic makes some great games, they have great online modes and the UT series is open to mods to make some endless gameplay and fun, in no way will they go away cause they won't support Wii, they are one of the best PC devs and thats what they need to support, they will be around for a while until someone can do their job better then them.

 Agreed. But, that doesn't mean you can't make a great chicken burger.

Epic knows how to make, arguably, great middleware, and since last gen's main middle ware was focused on PS2 hardware there are really none that focus on the commonalities of GC/Wii chipsets. So Epic could use their knowledge to make a Unreal3: Wii Edition that could push the little box to the extreme and possibly making it much much easier to develop a cross platform game for all current gen systems. Instead they are choosing to completely ignore the obviously winning console.

To me they re not looking outside the box and I think they are leaving a lot of money on the table. 

A 3rd party licensee is already developing UE3 for Wii to do exactly that.

 you do realise that epic make unreal tournament right, cuz that game is all about social interaction weather it be via online play or mods, so really I don't see them becoming obsolete and have no idea how you came up with that silly conclusion.

Epic can't learn how to make better video games on the Wii. What does truly mastering the Wii mean?

Epic use cutting edge technology which is not found on the Wii, why would they try and master the Wii when they can achieve more in trying to master the PS3 and 360 and make the kind of games they always do. Cutting edge games.

I know games aren't all about graphics, it's all about being fun and using ingenuity...blah blah blah

But Epic is trying to push what is possible in a game. In terms of exploiting the hardware capabilities of powerful games consoles which they can't do on the Wii.

They have already created so much in terms of additions to the U3 engine which the Wii can't handle so if they were to create for the Wii, they would have to go backwards! ( I know one of Epics licensees is trying to port the U3 engine to Wii but it just isn't possible to run it properly due to the Wii's hardware.)

The porting of the engine is not to make games that look like the PS3/360/PC counter parts, it's so that the great dev tools that come with UE3 can also be used on the Wii for ease of development, and that's the real aim.

I'm just going by this

"It's their own port, in the same way Ubisoft brought Unreal Engine 2 to the Wii [for Red Steel]," he said, noting prior to that response, "I just don't see a big market there to bring this big hulking memory intensive engine over to a much smaller system."

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/11/23/unreal-engine-3-coming-to-wii-but-not-by-epic/

And that makes sense to me.