Not too long ago, the VP of Epic Games – Mark Rein – made a statement that said the Unreal Engine 4 wouldn’t be possible to play on the Wii U. The implication of his statement was that the engine wouldn’t be available to developers, and if they wanted to ship a title using an Unreal Engine, they’d have to use Unreal Engine 3.
However, Rein has now backtracked his statement during an interview with Engadget:
“You heard the stupid gaffe yesterday about the Wii U. If someone wants to take Unreal Engine 4 and ship a game on Wii U, they can! If they wanna ship an Unreal Engine 4 game on Xbox 360, they could make it happen.”
It matters because this particular engine is scalable technology—so if developers want to use it on the Wii U, they can, though it’s possible some visuals will be reduced or degraded in that case. Epic Games won’t be using the engine for the Wii U, that’s for sure, but at least they’ve given developers the option of using it.
For the most part, this new engine is being touted as the “it” engine for the upcoming PS4 and new Xbox (whatever that may be), to create superb visuals on a console.