Lots of big surprises in gaming news today so let’s get started!

The most relevant to us is Unity’s announcement that Unity will have much better innate 2D capabilities sometime this Fall in the next major update (which is free to existing owners). I don’t know if these new tools will be easier to use than what we’re doing already (2D Toolkit) but if nothing else, it sounds like 2D games in Unity will have improved performance & lower requirements so that’s great.

Nintendo made some announcements. First up is a new model of the 3DS called the 2DS (yes, I’m not making this up) that is basically the regular 3DS model but with no clamshell design, no 3D capabilities, and mono speakers (which shouldn’t really matter because if you want to hear music on a portable game, you should be using headphones anyway). It’ll be $129 which is a good $50 less than the regular 3DS and $70 less than the 3DS XL. With the release of a new Pokemon & new Zelda this holiday season for the 3DS, I can see the lower price being huge in attracting the tween & teen crowd into buying the system.

Also, Nintendo announced a much needed Wii U price drops. They’re dropping the basic model, moving the Elite model to the basic model’s price ($299), and adding a new bundle for the same price that instead of containing Nintendoland, has a digital copy of the Zelda: Wind Waker HD game & a digital ebook of the Zelda art & history book they recently released (Hyrule Historia). This was a much needed move for Nintendo though I’m kind that they aren’t do a peace offering for early adopters like they did with the 3DS and even more annoyed that the “launch window” games that I was really excited about for the system are just now coming out, nowhere near launch. On the plus side, the Wii U is looking very solid this holiday season with a new Sonic, Rayman, Mario, and Donkey Kong Country, along with Wonderful 101 & the Wind Waker enhanced port.

Finally, Steam announced today that 100 games have been greenlit. This is by far, the biggest batch of games greenlit in one group (previous groups were around 15-20 games, I believe), so I’m guessing this means will see more and more frequent greenlights than we have in the past.

6 Responses

  1. The 2DS is coming out on October 12th, the same day as Pokemon X/Y. I’m willing to bet that there will be a Pokemon/2DS bundle as well.

    …basically it’s a Pokemon-for-Christmas machine.

  2. I was excited for the Wii U bundle until they said it was a digital game. Now I am skipping that and going for the limited edition Windwaker game that comes with a really sweet looking Ganondorf statue for $10 more. Will have my fingers crossed that they also make other bundles prior to Christmas or I will be deal hunting on Black Friday / Cyber Monday instead of buying this in October.

  3. I’m really excited about the Unity news too!

    Though it does mean changing how things are handled in my project (probably), I think it also offers some possibilities to having more mixed 2D-3D type games.

    Or at least that’s my hope. 😀

  4. The 2DS may be aimed at a younger crowd (Reggie explicitly made the example of a family with multiple children), but there are also a lot of people who either don’t care about 3D or aren’t able to really see it anyway (I fall into that category). So for the money that I save I could buy 2-3 games, which makes the 2DS rather attractive.

    The $299 Wii U Deluxe Wind Waker bundle is also REALLY interesting. Looks like I’ll be buying 3 new consoles this holiday season 🙂 (2DS, Wii U WW, PS4)

  5. Does the new Unity news mean that a Wii U port for your soon-to-be-on-Kicktarter game might be in the cards since Nintendo gives devs a free Unity Pro license to port their games to it?

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