I read that more along the lines of "If the Mario team makes an engine, ideally it should be usable by several other projects like Kirby, Yoshi, and Donkey Kong," but I could be reading that incorrectly. Like Captain Toad is clearly build on the same tech base used for Super Mario 3D World, but I'm not sure any of Nintendo's other games are.
Similarly the engine they're using to power Zelda might be an appropriate fit for a variety of other open world action adventure games by Nintendo.
I could see it also being a halfway house where the people they're making games with (where there are both Nintedo and third party staff on the title) are using a tech base Nintendo created. Some Kirby games are made externally at HAL Laboratory for example, but they might be offered to use Nintendo's technology to do that instead of having to make their own.
Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of their developers like Grezzo and Camelot who would really benefit from having access to Nintendo's internal technology. Those small developers almost certainly don't have the manpower to be developing their own engines for HD games.
They give out Unity engine with their development kits for the Wii U...
Right but Nintendo doesn't actually use Unity, or Unreal or Crytek, etc.
Pretty sure the Metroid Prime games use a heavily modified UE2 so I don't think it's anything new
What are you talking about? Many of their Wii U games have hit that number.
I'm fairly sure that rumours about Metroid was debunked but don't hold me to it.