Wii U ‘up to parity’ with 360, PS3

id Software’s John Cormack has said that Nintendo’s Wii U is, on raw tech terms at least, directly comparable to "other consoles" – namely the Xbox 360 and PS3.

However, this doesn’t mean that the firm will automatically be porting its id Tech 5 game engine to the machine. Instead, Cormack says that his firm will wait and see how the hardcore games market develops on the machine.

"The technology level on there brings it up to parity with the other consoles, which is nice for us," Cormack told GameSpot.

"Previously, the Wii was not a target. id Tech 5 was just not suitable for the Wii at all. We seriously talked about possibly using the iOS Rage technology that I built for that for a Wii game. It would fit perfectly from a technology standpoint, and I think would have been really pretty cool as a Wii game, but we decided that it wasn’t the right time to jump into the Wii market.

"Will become a market question of do we think that there will be people there that won’t be served by one of the other SKUs? If you’re going to have a serious hardcore game on there, the Wii is usually the hardcore gamer’s second or third console.

"Even if we could have shipped Rage in full glory on the Wii, it probably wouldn’t have made a whole lot of sense because people that want Rage probably also have a PC, 360, or PS3 that could do the game better justice.

"So we’ll be seeing how the market plays out on there."