Unity

At this year’s Game Developer Conference (GDC) Damon Baker, senior manager of marketing of the licensing department at Nintendo America, had quite a bit to say about the Wii U’s future. According to what he told Siliconera, there are more than 50 games coming out for the Wii U which will be utilizing the Unity engine.

For now there are 17 games that have already been completed and expected to release in a few months. Baker added, “And then, we have another 50 that are waiting in the wings, that are coming; so we’ve got a lot of Unity content on the way."

A few of these upcoming titles have already been showcased at GDC and they included Cubemen 2, Little Dew, and Teslagrad. Also let’s not forget the Mario vs. Donkey Kong tech demo that was made using Nintendo Web Framework. This is another game engine that is there to help indie developers create games the Wii U. So here is to hoping that games continue to be created for the Wii U.

Microsoft has gone ahead and shown more support for the independent developer community. Sony has been supporting indie producers for a while now, with PlayStation 4 turning out to be one of the best platforms for indie games. This console war every feature is a battlefield, thus it is only natural for Microsoft to come in and even out the playing field.

Microsoft has just revealed that the Unity add-on will be free for indie developers that are registered in the Independent Developers @Xbox program. This was done in order to open up greater possibilities for developers on the Xbox One.

The Unity add-on which will be releasing in 2014, will allow the registered developers to use the Unity game engine to publish their games on not only on the Xbox One, but also on Windows 8 PCs and Windows 8 devices. According to Microsoft, this move will level out the playing field for all developers, big or small.

In addition to this, Xbox One-only Unity Pro license will also be offered to “qualified” developers. For now Microsoft has promised to be out on the lookout for any upcoming impressive titles, but making Unity available for free to those who are willing to register is definitely a step ahead in ensuring original and creating content for the Xbox One.

 "Microsoft continues to show their commitment to creating opportunity for developers of all shapes and sizes, a commitment shared by Unity," said Unity Technologies CEO David Helgason. "The drive behind the [email protected] program is exciting for Unity and the games development community in general. We can’t wait to see the results.”

At this year’s Gamescom the [email protected] program was announced which was created in hopes of making development and publishing much easier on the Xbox One than it was on the Xbox 360; thus being able to compete with other self-publish friendly consoles like the PS4 and Wii U. With more developers working with Unity engine, this sort of pro indie movement could really open up great possibilities for indie developers.