It seems like Nintendo is pursuing getting Unity engine development support for the Nintendo 3DS. The development suite and engine are wildly popular with indie developers, as the ease of use and rapid porting options make for a more streamlined approach to development.

This confirmation is via our friends at Siliconera, when they managed to sneak a few questions by Nintendo’s Senior Manager of Marketing at their American licensing department. They pointed out the recently published numbers of the 3DS reaching over 42 million units sold worldwide, asking if they were considering bringing Unity support to the system, to which Baker replied:

“We’ve had those discussions and we are definitely looking at that”

Coming from this, if support for the Unity engine were made possible, the porting of new games to the platform would become much less of a hassle, as currently both indies and veterans alike have to go through somewhat convoluted methods of porting their games to the platform. Baker continued:

“Our priority was to get the Wii U build [of Unity] up and done and ready. Because we need a test environment for it, it’s taken a while for Unity to get finalized on Wii U, so that we can actually test against it. So that has been made available now and that is why we’ve got all of these [game] candidates waiting in the wings that are just going through the submission process at this point.”

The problem is that not everyone owns a Wii U, as that platform’s sales have been somewhat sluggish and not as readily adopted as the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One. So what does this mean for Unity support on the 3DS? Apparently, once they get the Wii U middleware going, enabling it on the 3DS would be the next step:

“Now, we can move on to other platforms and see how we can make those compatible,” he continued, “either with Unity or with additional middleware providers as well.”

“So, 3DS is definitely an exciting platform for us, because we’ve got a huge install base, and we want to take advantage of that. We’ve got a lot of developers that want to take advantage of it. So, we’re working towards that as well. But nothing to announce at this time.”

While the 3DS userbase has been rapidly growing and welcoming a multitude of excellent games, having Unity support would make it that much easier for developers to bring their games over to the platform.