Mark Rein: No money in Wii engines

Oct 5, 2007

Epic has achieved stunning visual feats on the high-end consoles of today, most notably with Gears of War and Unreal Tournament III. But there seems little chance of it going to work on Wii's microchips, as Mark Rein openly admits: "I don't think there's a lot of money in making engines for the Wii."

It's a common notion that relatively few games push the Wii to its graphical limit (Super Mario Galaxy being the clear exception), but Rein has little interest in stepping in to show everyone how it's done.

"What we're doing is the really high-end, next-generation visuals," he said. "We're pushing these machines real hard. I just think that we have too many things on our plate to go back and put resources into that kind of thing."

One of his key reasons seemed to be a doubt of the profitability for third parties on Wii.

"I think the big software dollars right now are being earned on Xbox 360, and they're going to be earned on PlayStation 3. And I think, unless you're going to sell your engine to Nintendo, you're going for scraps on that platform," he told GameTrailers.

We have one question, though: when will people stop referring to the very-much current-gen PS3 and Xbox 360 as "next-gen"? Stop it!

Courtesy of CVG.