Nintendo signs deal to bring Unity Engine to Wii U
In an announcement made today, it has been revealed that Unity Technologies and Nintendo have signed a deal to bring the Unity Engine to the Wii U. You might not have heard of the Unity Engine before but you would have probably played a game running on it. The engine is the driving force behind many iOS and Android games. It has been used on the Wii and other consoles but not as much.
The Unity Engine is widely regarded in the industry and it’s a really good thing that it’s coming to the Wii U.
“The rapid growth of incredible games coming from the experienced and talented developers in our community makes Unity the new development platform of choice for AAA console developers,” said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies in a press release.
“Nintendo’s unfettered access to Unity will produce a wealth of insanely good games from knowledgeable Nintendo developers and the Wii U deployment add-on will create an amazing opportunity for our massive community of developers to showcase their incredible creativity on one of the most anticipated and innovative gaming platforms to date.”
So not only does this mean that games running the Unity Engine could come to the Wii U, but that also Nintendo and it’s developers could use the engine if need be.
This means we could see lots more mobile games or games from mobile developers on the Wii U, possibly on the ‘WiiWare’ service that’s coming for the Wii. Anything has to be better than what was offered up with WiiWare, its troublesome rules and regulations made only the most devout developers to ever make anything good on the service.
I’m pretty sure most people don’t get just how important this move is. I have worked with Unity for a fair bit back in 08/09 and I must say that this engine is perfect for indie developers to get their ideas out into the wild with minimal resistance against the technology.
It was scary just how easy it was to built a FPS game in this thing, you can drop your 3DS/Maya file in and then Unity does its magic to generate all the bounding boxes and collision tables so that you can have a game up and running in hours not days or weeks.
Expect great things from this on Wii U. Sony did this with Unreal engine 3 but their move was aimed at major developers and even then Unreal is nowhere near as easy to use. In summary good move Nintendo. 😀