>>34
The 3DS has general shaders to hasten and cheapen the development process. Instead of a company making their own shaders (and requiring a good programmer) they can have basically a scripter (a cheap programmer), and spend the rest on artists, or hopefully, people who will make good gameplay (there will probably be many engines for the 3ds, I wouldn't be surprised if Unreal came out with a version, especially with the first 3d gaming console)
One example of their general shaders ia a lighting one. How much time and money would normally be spent on making a lighting algorithm, something which has been done 1000x before, and in every situation requires bugtesting, patching, etc?