The release of the Wii U has done surprisingly little to quiet the debate over whether the system is actually powerful enough to stand up to the likes of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, much less the new Sony and Microsoft systems coming later in the year. Recent comments from DICE Technical Director for Frostbite Johan Andersson lends some weight to the argument that Nintendo's new system isn't powerful enough to stand up to the next generation.

After mentioning on Twitter that the newly announced Star Wars games from DICE and Visceral will be running on DICE's powerful Frostbite 3 engine, Andersson responded to a reader concern that this will mean the games will not be available for the Wii U.

"[Frostbite 3] has never been running on WiiU," Andersson tweeted. "We did some tests with not too promising results with [Frostbite 2] & chose not to go down that path."

This statement follows a Eurogamer interview from March's Game Developers Conference in which DICE's Patrick Bach admitted DICE "could probably make a Wii U game in theory" but said the company is not currently interested in devoting "development time" to the system. "To make the most out of the Wii U, that's a different game because of the different peripherals. We want to utilize all the power of each console... It's about 'where do you put your focus?' And the Wii U is not a part of our focus right now."

So it's not just a question of focus but a question of performance.

This is not encouraging news for Nintendo, considering that Frostbite 2 was running ably on the Xbox 360 and PS3 in late 2011's Battlefield 3. If Wii U tests for that engine were "not too promising," then the system would seemingly have no chance of running Frostbite 3-powered Battlefield 4 later this year, not to mention more demanding games coming down the pike.

Keep in mind, too, that last year's version of Madden NFL on the Wii U didn't make use of the real-time physics modeling of the Infinity Engine that powered other versions of the game (possibly contributing to EA's decision not to release a Wii U version of Madden this year). Similarly, Epic's Unreal Engine 4 won't be offering official support for the Wii U, though Epic's Mark Rein has clarified that the engine will technically be able to create scaled-down games for Nintendo's hardware.

Put it all together, and it paints a picture of a system that's not really ready to handle the high-end graphical experiences third-party developers will be offering this year, much less marquee titles being planned for the future. In this way, the Wii U is shaping up to follow the lead of the Wii, which developers often ignored for ports of popular titles in part because it just wasn't powerful enough to do them justice (the Wii's unorthodox controller and more casual, family-focused audience also played into this trend).

The question, then, is whether developers will devote the resources to developing explicitly scaled-down ports for the Wii U, or even exclusive games that make use of its unique features. For that to have a chance of happening, Nintendo is first going to have to prove that there is a significant audience of gamers to reach on the system, meaning that hardware sales are going to have to improve. It's an uphill battle, for sure.