Nintendo has "mastered" the Unreal Engine, says Miyamoto

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has said the company’s internal development teams have "mastered" the Unreal Engine, according to VentureBeat.

Speaking at a Q&A session with investors in Kyoto, Miyamoto reportedly spoke at length about how the team had been experimenting with the popular game engine and how the Switch had been built with easy software development in mind.

That ease of software development has also been felt by Nintendo’s internal developers,” Miyamoto said. Also, even though game software developers in the US and EU are often said to have superior skills to their Japanese counterparts when it comes to software development techniques, Nintendo’s 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.”

Miyamoto also reportedly spoke about the ease of porting PC titles to its upcoming Switch console, thanks to its custom Nvidia Tegra chip and its full support for Unreal and Unity graphics engines.

It’s not yet clear whether Nintendo will go on to use the Unreal Engine in any of its upcoming titles, but it seems the company’s tried to make the Switch as open as possible to external developers.

For our previous game platforms, creating our own development tools was a high priority for us,” managing executive officer Shinya Takahashi added.

However, since the start of Nintendo Switch development we have been aiming to realize an environment in which a variety of different third-party developers are able to easily develop compatible software, such as by making it compatible with Unreal and Unity as well as our own development tools. As a result, even companies with only a few developers have already started making games for Nintendo Switch.”

The Nintendo Switch launches worldwide on March 3rd, with a UK tour of the console due to kick off on February 10th. You can read more about the Nintendo Switch in this week’s issue of MCV, as well as ourhands on with the new console, what the wider industry think of the Switch as well as UK retailers.