One of Nintendo's big challenges last generation was drumming up third-party developer support. This time around, the company is taking greater steps to ensure that doesn't happen, with Nintendo this week teaming up with Epic Games to offer a “fully-featured” version of the Unreal Engine for free to approved developers working on games for the Switch.

Starting with Unreal Engine version 4.15, experimental Switch support was added but with the latest 4.16 update, the engine now fully supports Nintendo's latest platform. Registering a developer account with Nintendo will also allow Epic to offer access to the UE4 Nintendo Switch forum, where devs can discuss the engine amongst themselves.

“After launching early support for Nintendo Switch development in February’s Unreal Engine 4.15 release, Epic is proud to announce fully-featured native support for the popular platform in Unreal Engine 4.16. Epic Games has teamed up with Nintendo to release the full Unreal Engine 4 source code for Nintendo Switch to approved developers for free!”

Hopefully this will encourage more developers to bring their third-party games to the Nintendo Switch in addition to other platforms.

KitGuru Says: From what we have heard so far, support for the Nintendo Switch appears to be pretty strong. Having popular engine support will go a long way into helping things stay that way.

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