Following the speculation earlier today that the Nintendo NX could be set to go the way of other Nintendo consoles and struggle for third-party support, another developer has spoken out against Nintendo’s secrecy regarding the company’s upcoming console, saying that third-party devs won’t have time to create games for it at launch due to a lack of dev kits.
Thomas Mahler, a developer for Ori and the Blind Forest creators Moon Studios, responded to Unravel developer Martin Sahlin’s earlier claims that Nintendo is still keeping the NX hidden away from some third-party developers. However, while Sahlin mostly seemed bemused by the situation, Mahler appears to be infuriated by the lack of communication from Nintendo regarding the NX, revealing how Moon Studios has attempted to get in touch with the company yet has received “absolutely nothing” in the way of a reply, adding that he can “guarantee that they’ll just not have any software support, since nobody can just jumble games together in less than a year.”
Read Mahler’s comments, via NeoGAF, below:
“This is actually THE singlest most annoying thing for every dev out there. We also talked to Nintendo and got absolutely nothing – I’ll never understand that. And just to be clear, it’s not just Nintendo, every hardware manufacturer is treating their devkits and their unreleased consoles like they’re the second coming and are insanely secretive about it to a stupid degree in todays time. It’s not even that the hardware isn’t finished (duh), but you could at least give me the goddamn specs, so we’d know what to build shit for!
What’s needed to sell hardware is goddamn good software. With Nintendo not having any devkits out there at this point and probably even wanting to sell it in 2016, I can already guarantee that they’ll just not have any software support, since nobody can just jumble games together in less than a year. I mean, you can, but it’ll be garbage.
The same is true for Engine Support – Get Unity and Epic to support these consoles WAAAAY ahead of release. By the time the console launches, it should be EASY for developers to develop games for these systems, things shouldn’t just only start at this point. I want the goddamn devkits or at least proper hardware specs ideally 2 years before release – Keep all the developers updated, start a forum where devs can chat and figure out all the problems everyone’s having, instead of everyone just having to deal with it. None of that’s happening anywhere and it’s just brain-damaged.”
While Mahler did note that Nintendo wasn’t the only hardware manufacturer responsible for being secretive with developers regarding their upcoming consoles, considering the Wii U drastically underperformed largely as a result of its lack of software, it’s concerning that Nintendo has seemingly failed to change its approach for the NX.
