potato_hamster said:
It's almost laughable how much confidence you have when it's obvious you've never made a console video game, much less a video game for a Nintendo console in your life. I have. What makes you think the Wii had low development costs, or that the development costs of the Wii U are somehow higher? Companies made super cheap shovelware games for the Wii because it sold like gangbusters to casuals, and because third party games sold horrifically, these companies knew they had to be cheap in order to be successful. Making a solid game for the Wii didn't cost less than making a solid game for the X360.
And now you're pretending that this "single platform" will somehow be significantly less expensive to develop as a console for Nintendo than it is to develop two separate platforms, and I'm just curious why you think this. Name me a single video game platform that has supported significantly different hardware specifications, different control schemes/ form factors. Ohh right, none. Care to tell me how much cheaper the NX dev kit will be to develop and purchase than it will be to develop seperate developer kits for the Wii U and 3DS? Because it could actually cost Nintendo more than those two combined, and that's just the developers kits. Based on my experience with Nintendo, their developer kits, and their developer tools, Nintendo is by far the worst platform to develop for. Their tools are serverely lacking compared to Sony and MS, and their Dev Kits are much harder to use and have less features. Now you expect them to develop a dev kit that is arguably the most complicated, sophisticated dev kit ever made, and have it be cheaper than other dev kits, and have improve tools that actually make it easier to develop for compared to its predecessors? That's unrealistic. Is the firmware/OS going to be simpler to create and develop for. Perhaps, but that really is only a benefit for Nintendo itself.
Now, does this really address a game drought? Not really. Since this whole game drought revolves around Nintendo games, and as we have established, Nintendo's first party games do not sell consoles like they used to, spreading all of the Nintendo IPs across both platforms does what exactly? How is this going to sell significantly more games? Which leads me to third parties. Why on earth will they bother? Because it's cheaper to develop a game for NX combined than it is to make a game for both the NX and the 3DS? So what? That's only cheaper for the developers who are already making games for both platforms. For any third party that isn't currently making Wii U or 3DS games, the NX will be far more expensive to develop a game for than it would be to just make a Wii U game or just made a 3DS game, and third parties don't even want to make that investment as it is! Think about it. On the testing side alone you literally doubled the time and cost of testing compared to a PS4 game. Then there's adjustments to things like audio quality, texture quality, 3D models, animations and rigs, UI adjustments, AI and gameplay adjustments for the different specs, etc. etc. All of these things will need to be modified and tested for each specification. It doesn't "just scale".
Aside from that, what realistic reason do you have to think that the NX as a whole will sell so much better than the 3DS to justify the added development costs? You think indies are going to like this set up? It will still be cheaper for them to make a PS4 game than to make an NX game. Why would they bother?
You are making all kinds of baseless assumptions that has convinced you that this unifed platform will be a huge hit, while completely glossing over these gigantic, glaring issues in the whole thing. The unified platform makes sense for Nintendo, and only Nintendo. For third parties it's a disaster waiting to happen
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