'Mastered' Unreal Engine now officially supports Nintendo Switch

By Jon Martindale February 15, 2017

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Epic Games has released a new update for its Unreal Engine, which adds official support for Nintendo’s upcoming Switch console. While the Japanese gamemaker has been working with the popular developmental engine for some time now, this patch makes things official, and means that we should see a number of UE4 games on the Switch in the future.

One of the biggest problems with Nintendo’s Wii U console was its lack of third-party support, so getting a popular engine like Unreal Engine working well on the next-gen system is a smart move. It also comes at a time when Japanese developers appear to be catching up with the West in learning how to best utilize the Unreal Engine, so it is expected to see much greater adoption among Eastern studios.

Nintendo’s own Shigeru Miyamoto previously stated how confident he was in Nintendo’s command of the engine and said that it would help make porting games from the PC to the Switch that much easier.

This release of Nintendo Switch support is official, though is said to be still in the “experimental” phase. Epic promises that the next release will change that to a “shippable state.”

Along with the addition of Nintendo Switch support in the new 4.15 update for the Unreal Engine, Epic has also improved stability, enhanced developer workflows, and added improvements to runtime performance. We’re told that this improves efficiency during development and should lead to a better user experience post-release.

One big feature that a number of developers will enjoy though, is an improvement to compile times for programmers. Epic claims they have been reduced by as much as 50 percent. While it’s not clear what effect that may have on programmer excuses moving forward, it should be of a real boon to all developers.

Other improvements to the engine include better texture streaming, which should reduce CPU and memory usage, as well as load times; reduced overhead in executing Blueprints; the addition of a new UI blur widget, and new texture streaming debugging visualization tools, among hundreds of bug fixes.

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Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years.
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward.
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis."
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

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For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.