Nintendo is considering bringing Unity support to the 3DS

Developers working on Wii U projects have counted the Unity engine among their options since last year, but support for Unity is still absent from the 3DS. Considering more than 42 million 3DS units have been sold worldwide, in comparison to the 5.86 million Wii U shipped to retailers as of January, Unity’s absence from the 3DS is puzzling. Unity support was added to Sony’s Vita in January, so doing the same with the 3DS would feel like a logical move if Nintendo wants to stay competitive as a host of developer-friendly platforms.

At GDC, Siliconera caught up with Nintendo’s Damon Baker, who is the Senior Manager of Marketing at Nintendo’s of America’s Licensing department. One of the questions we asked Baker is whether Nintendo have plans to bring the Unity engine to Nintendo 3DS. Last year, Nintendo announced a partnership with Unity Technologies, through which the two companies created a Wii U-specific version of the widely used Unity engine, making it easier for developers to bring their games to the platform. To sweeten the deal for developers, Nintendo arranged it so that buying a Wii U development kit comes with a free copy of Unity as well. As a result, a large number of indie games using Unity are in the pipeline for Wii U—alongside PC and other consoles—which will help fill a gap in the platform’s sparse library in the months to come.