The thing with Nintendo’s upcoming NX is, it needs to be a success, if the company plans on staying in the gaming hardware business for much longer. And the thing with that is, the NX needs third party games to be a success. And the thing with that is, Nintendo needs to get far better about communicating with third parties about exactly what their plans are, if they want said third parties on board.
But everything we are hearing so far really doesn’t seem to indicate that this is the case. EGM reports that Toys for Bob, who are the developers of the Skylanders games, one of the last bastions of major thirdparty support on Nintendo’s Wii U, still don’t know what the NX is, nor do they have a devkit.
“We haven’t heard any news from Nintendo, so we don’t have any announcements,”Paul Yan, associate creative direcotr for Toys for Bob, said when asked if the game will come to Nintendo’s next system.
Lou Studdert, associate producer at Toys for Bob, supported Yan’s claim, saying that Nintendo has a history of playing it safe when releasing information about consoles. “I don’t know what [the NX] is,” he said, which echoes something that Unravel‘s developers had told us in an exclusive interview a while back.
It also appears as though Ready at Dawn, the developers of last year’s disappointing The Order 1886, don’t have NX devkits yet either, despite the widespread assumption that they were working on bringing their next game to the system.
“The day one plan [for Deformers] is to launch on Xbox [One], PlayStation 4, and PC… What about NX? That’s the thing. Honestly, we are waiting,” Ready at Dawn cofounder and chief creative officer Ru Weerasuriya said.
Of course, there is a possibility that these companies do have devkits, and that some kind of a nondisclosure agreement prevents them from speaking about the NX in any capacity at all- but that requires me to put some faith in Nintendo’s third party relation skills, and I will be very honest, I don’t think Nintendo deserve that kind of the benefit of the doubt any more.
That said, at least one developer did confirm to having NX devkits, and to being in constant, active dialog with Nintendo about the system. “On the GameTrust side, we’ve seen where [Nintendo is] at and that’s a conversation that keeps going… Since they announced the NX officially, they’ve been kind of wrangling a lot of the inquiries… and, from my perspective, it seems like they’re trying to get their hands around what type of they content they want to have for their launch window,” said Mark Stanley, vice president of internal development at GameTrust, the GameStop subsidiary publishing Deformers.
What exactly is going on with this system? Honestly, I wish I could answer that question, but that’s the thing, I’m not sure even Nintendo know any more. The NX right now is beginning to sound like a bit of a disaster- let’s just hope that Nintendo manage to right the ship before it leaves the harbor.
[EGM]
