The last contender in the current gen consoles war, Nintendo promised to do hit all the right notes with its upcoming not-a-console-not-a-handheld Nintendo NX. Apparently, that doesn't include securing third party developers' support.
At least two high profile game developers have expressed their frustration with Nintendo's uncooperative and super secretive approach when it comes to the NX. The developer behind Unravel, Coldwood Interactive’s Martin Sahlin, was approached by Nintendo who asked him to design a game for the NX without while refusing to give him any info about the system.
"They’re really secretive about it! About the NX, it’s funny, really," he told GamingBolt. "I wish I knew more about it, but they’re really secretive about it. 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’ (laughs)."
"So he wanted me to pitch something for the NX, and then he could tell me more about what it was. But basically, 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."
Moon Studios' Thomas Mahler, the creator of Ori and the Blind Forest, also took to Neogaf forum to voice his frustration.
"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."
Alienating third party developers sure looks like a stupid business strategy; but you would do good to remember that this very same strategy worked impressively well for the original Wii. Of course, this was also the reason why the original Wii suffocated gradually after the first two or three years in market. It is entirely possible that Nintendo plans to support the NX with its first party games for a year or so while third parties polish their games. That, or the company is still as arrogant as ever.
