Every time a new Nintendo system arrives, fans hope and pray that Nintendo will finally figure out how to play nice with third-party developers. Nintendo-published games are typically always great, but it’s nice to have something to play more often than every two or three months.
Well, it’s a very poorly-kept secret that Nintendo has been working on its next console, codenamed the Nintendo NX, for a while now, and unfortunately it sounds like their approach to third parties hasn’t changed much. Recently Martin Sahlin, an employee of Coldwood Interactive, the developer behind the recent Unravel, talked about how frustrating it is to even get basic information about the NX.
“They’re really secretive about it! About the NX, it’s funny, really. I actually had a really fun discussion with a person from Nintendo a while back. It was basically ‘I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.’ So he wanted me to pitch something for the NX, and then he could tell me more about what it was. But it’s kind of hard to pitch something when you don’t even know what it is! So if you manage to guess it right, we’ll tell you what it is. So, I don’t know. But I am just as curious as everybody else to see what they’ve been making.”
Since then, an employee of Moon Studios, creators of Ori and the Blind Forest also chimed in on Nintendo’s lack of NX communication…
“We also talked to Nintendo and got absolutely nothing. I’ll never understand that. 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.”
I can’t say this information is shocking, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. If Nintendo really does plan to launch the NX in 2016, we could be in for a pretty barren lineup. Of course, maybe the mega developers like Activision and Ubisoft have their devkits, but increasingly it’s companies like Coldwood Interactive and Moon Studios that are making the games people really talk about. Hopefully Nintendo isn’t being as shortsighted as it appears from the outside.
(via Crave & GamingBolt)