Nintendo’s NX may be a thing and that thing may even be out this year but there’s a severe lack of details available. This goes for developers like Moon Studios director Thomas Mahler who worked on Ori and The Blind Forest for Xbox One and PC. Mahler criticized Nintendo on NeoGAF for being too secretive about the NX’s specs and while this applied to many console manufacturers, it’ll be particularly troublesome if the NX releases this year.
“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 today’s 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 dev-kits 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.”
Engines like Unity and Unreal Engine should also be supported extremely early according to Mahler. “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.”
Could all of this spell trouble for the Nintendo NX if it does release this year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.