Ever keen to disperse the belief that they are unable to rally third-party publishers to support their consoles, Nintendo has worked hard to ease the effort required to port games to Nintendo Switch.
It had been a high priority for Nintendo Switch to be compatible with Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, tools that Nintendo hopes will encourage developers to bring quality games to the console.
The incomparable Shigeru Miyamoto even shared a parting shot, dismissing claims that western developers “have superior skills” with software development techniques. He shared that the company’s development teams have “mastered state-of-the-art technologies such as Unreal engine,” and are, therefore, now comparable to western developers.
“Regarding our software development environment, we have taken the software development teams for home console systems and for handheld systems, which used to be two different departments, and integrated them into one, and this has been very beneficial as they are now developing software as a team in the same environment,” Miyamoto explained at the Corporate Management Policy Briefing.
“In addition, third-party developers who are making software for PC can now easily adapt that software to work on our platform. In the current development environment, Iʼd say that it would take less than a year for them to port a PC game to Nintendo Switch. That ease of software development has also been felt by Nintendoʼs internal developers.
“Also, even though game software developers in the U.S. and E.U. are often said to have superior skills to their Japanese counterparts when it comes to software development techniques, Nintendoʼs software developers have mastered state-of-the-art technologies such as Unreal engine, and their skills can now be compared with those of Western developers. Our developers are more excited than ever to create software.”
Nintendo Switch will launch worldwide on Friday 3rd March, priced at £279.99 ($299.99).
