I would like to use the Unreal Engine 4 for Wii U development. Do I need to talk to some higher ups for this?
- Ernesto M.
Wii u is extremely underpowered to run Unreal the way it should and that is the reason that they are probably never going to support it. Lets hope the replacement of Wii u will be capable of more things power wise .
The information on this AnswerHub post can help.
…compared to the mobile phones and tablets Unreal 4 also supports?
It’s not strictly a hardware issue.
If you want to render full-scale quality SSR with tessellation and subsurface scattering for billions of polygons and 4k textures on everything with your custom dynamic GI solution, no, the Wii U can’t handle that. But the Wii U is powerful enough to render Mario Kart 8’s awesome physically-based shaders in 60 FPS split screen. The engine is indeed scaleable. Remove SSR, use static lighting, and get rid of anti-aliasing, and you’ve just made it possible to run 720p at 60 frames per second on Wii-U-like hardware.
The bigger problem would be how you package the game for release on a console. UE4 can cook to PC, App store, Android, PS4, and Xbox One, but not the Wii U. If you have a dedicated programmer on your team and are able to cook the content to run on the Wii U, it’s technically possible (I mean, the source code is available for anyone to mess with), but you will have to convert code to be compatible with an x86 CPU, and it has to be custom-built for the Wii U. I’m not sure how Wii U devs do it, but I’m sure Nintendo provides an SDK unit to develop with, which includes their own software for interfacing with the Gamepad. I think this is something a potential developer will have to contact Nintendo and ask for.
As for the specifics of getting UE4 to run on the Wii U… 
Which part? I’m currently writing this message from my computer with Unreal Engine 4 running in the background on a machine running off of an x86 CPU.
Going off what Chance told me when I asked him about this, it’s a business thing as much as it’s a hardware thing. While iOS and Android phones are drastically different from PCs and consoles, it was financially viable to support them because they’re so ubiquitous and developers want to develop for them.
Wii U is a third world apart from the rest and would require similar amounts of resources to support, but the install base and developer desire isn’t strong enough to make the resources spent worthwhile for Epic. If Nintendo were to approach them in the same way they did Unity and subsidise its development and give them all the tools they needed then it would be done already.
While I absolutely would prefer to develop in Unreal instead of Unity for my Wii U games, I completely understand the situation. I wish it were different. Hopefully there’s some way to link HTML5 support with Nintendo Web Framework, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Maybe we can start a kickstarter fund to try to convince Epic to support Wii U. Talk to some staff, post it, I’ll contribute.
Edit: Wii U uses a PowerPC processor, not the same kind of thing you see in PCs, Macs, and current-gen consoles, which tend to be intel-based x86 or x64. Androids and iPhones tend toward ARM.
And Smartphones are getting faster, Wii U hardware is fixed.