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potato_hamster on 29 September 2015
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zorg1000 said:
potato_hamster said:

Are they going to have the exact same hardware specifications? No? Are you going to be able to make the same memory allocations? No? Cache sizes? No? etc. etc. Since the answer is "No" then you need to accomodate that. At the end of the day you will never be able to make a game for the NX Home and it "just run" a "scaledown version" on the NX Portable. There is additional costs involved with every specification you add.

You can try to find it if you want. I certainly wasn't proven wrong, and I hardly call what I said "backtracking" as much as I was clarifying that while it may be possible to develop tools, and develop the engine to make some parts of the development more streamlined (some of which I overlooked, and conceded to), it would still at the end of the day be more expensive to develop a game for the NX platform than it would be to develop a game on the PS4 or Xbox One.

Why can't the hardware specifications be extremely similar, like the newest iPod Touch & Apple TV for example? Like I said earlier, they aren't trying to get the games that are on PS4/XB1, it's to make the games that currently release on Nintendo platforms to be available on either form factor and no longer be segregated. The 3rd party support that it will get will be the Japanese 3rd parties that support Nintendo handhelds, the family/casual friendly western games and indies that both get and if the Android rumors are true than it will likely get a solid chuck of mobile titles.


They absolutely can be, and Apple is a great example of what Nintendo will need to do if Nintendo wants to be successful with this approach. However, there is no making a game for the iPhone 6 and it "just working" on the iPhone 4, or iPad, or apple tv. You need to test every change on each phone, on each iPad, and on each apple tv. That costs a lot of time and money. You often times need to revise textures, 3D models, animations, UI, controls (for apple tv) etc for each one of those models. That also costs a lot of time and money. Let me put it to you this way - why is it that there are a plethora of apps and games that are available for the iPhone, that aren't available for the iPad or apple tv,  or vice versa? Because it isn't as simple as "scaling it down". It takes time and effort to develop for each platform, and that all increases development cost, and thus it makes developing for that platform as a whole more expensive.

Another thing that Apple allows you to do that Nintendo probably won't is they allow you develop for thatever device you choose. Want to make an app that just runs on iPhone. Go ahead. Just iPad? All the power to you. Apple TV and iPad? Have at it. Will Nintendo allow this though? Something tells me they won't. If they are pushing for a unified platform they're going to want every game to exist on every specification, otherwise what's the point if consumers have to buy each spec to get access to the full library, right? Well what that means is that there are added development costs to develop on NX that developers will not have to endure to develop for other platforms. It means that NX will be the most expensive platform to develop for. That is a very, very hard sell if you're Nintendo and you're trying to convince third parties to come to your platform.