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Keeping Nintendo NX secret from game devs is “just braindamaged,” says Moon Studios head
There is an extreme level of secrecy surrounding unannounced game consoles that keeps even game developers in the dark, and according to Thomas Mahler, CEO of Moon Studios (Ori and the Blind Forest), this is a huge problem.
In a recent post on NeoGAF, Mahler agreed with comments made by Unravel creator Martin Sahlin, who said the he has been unsuccessful in his attempts to pry information from Nintendo Co Ltd about its still-unannounced console, which is codenamed “Nintendo NX.”
“This is actually THE singlest [sic] most annoying thing for every dev out there,” Mahler said. “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 sh*t for!”
Mahler said that if Nintendo plans on releasing NX this year, the system will likely have little to no support from developers early on.
“Nobody can just jumble games together in less than a year,” Mahler said. “I mean, you can, but it’ll be garbage.”
While keeping new consoles under such strict secrecy is a problem for individual game studios, Mahler said that it is also a problem for the companies behind the game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine 4, which would be used by developers to create games for those consoles.
“By the time the console launches, it should be EASY for developers to develop games for these systems,” Mahler said, “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 braindamaged.”
Image courtesy of Moon Studios
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