Why I think Nintendo left out cross game chat

[Sal.Paradise]

happydolphin said:

Sal.Paradise said:

Not at all (@ the 'bullshit') but it certainly is Sumo's choice.

The purpose of this thread is to attempt to explain a poor design choice as intentional. If it is indeed intentional, and Nintendo opted to have every developer decide whether to spend extra resources on implementing voice chat themselves rather than have it OS level, ready for them to implement painlessly, this is indeed a casualty of that strategy.

Hopefully, it's still easy enough to implement that it will only be a concern for launch games like this one on a tight deadline, but who knows at this point. 

Okay, I have 2 questions then.

Does Sony charge its 3rd parties to use x-game chat for vita? If not, that's a big value they are offering for free.

Does MS charge its 3rd parties to use x-game chat for the xbox? If yes, why force devs to pay? Are they required to use it? If they want to use it, does MS give the devs the choice to go with their own implementation if they wanted to? If yes, then you would be right, that MS gives them an option that Nintendo does not.

Honestly I don't know how they work on those systems - there doesn't seem to be info on it that I can find - but the fact is that those features are all OS level and standard in every game, and so I wouldn't expect it to cost the devs anything to add it in as it's just present and working on the hardware already, they most likely don't have to touch it. Maybe a single line of code to integrate it into the game? I don't know how that works. 

Obviously Sumo have found that adding it on their own on the Wii U version takes time they don't have, so it must involve some sort of coding/individual implementation.