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Soundwave on 03 October 2015
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spemanig said:
Soundwave said:

That's fine, but that's not a unified platform then. 

If a third party developer has to basically in effect make two different versions of a game for it to actually run on both devices, then largely speaking I think most developers will say "thanks but no thanks". 

I don't think that console NX will get much support at all either. Third parties went through this before with the Wii U, the PS4/XB1 versions of all their multiplats are just going to sell like 1 million+ on the PS4 and then the XB1 a little less, and then waaaaaaay down there you're going to have the NX console version with like 80k for Madden or Bio Shock. 

Most devs won't bother. The whole appeal to the unified platform was always that you might be able to get at some of that REAL Nintendo audience, that is the one that buys their portables. If it's too much trouble though or devs have to use last gen engines, they'll probably just not bother with that either. 

The console NX is just an automatic no-go, it may as well be the Wii U 2. Too little, way too late, developers have to pay their bills and that means focusing on the PS4/XB1 that have an actual audience that is proven to buy the types of games they make. 


Oh, yes it is a unified platform. The end result would be like those two games, but the developement behind them would be absolutely nothing like them where they are building two completely different games and just tracing what's on one to the other. Third party devs already make multiple versions of games. That's what ports are. That's what different settings on PCs are. This would be much less than that, because the platform is absolutely built to make it as easy as possible to do. It'll be almost as simple for devs as making an ultra setting and a low end setting on a PC rig, just with added optimization for both.

It's way too soon to think the NX won't get support. The Wii U was underpowered and was selling like shit. That's why it didn't get support. The NX has the benefit of having a unified installed base where the handheld will be pretty much guaranteed to sell amazing. It also will likely be on par with the PS4 and XBO, meaning that there won't be anything stopping them from getting ports outside of Nintendo's audience. Even if the home console is seemingly a slouch, they can still judge the installed base as one massive one while still building the game for the NX and then simply scaling down and optimizing for the NXDS version. And since the NX will likely be on par with the other systems, and will be getting a better flow of first party games as well as third party games because of the unified installed base, I see no reason to immediately assume that it will be DOA. On the contrary, it's hilariously dismissive.


Again, if the handheld is what has the userbase, but I can't run my modern engines on it from the PS4/X1, then for me as a third party this means shit to me. 

Third parties do not care about Nintendo. And I don't blame them for not caring, Nintendo has given them plenty of reasons not to. 

If anything NX will have a *harder* time because the Wii U was at least the sucessor to the monstrously successful Wii, and got things like Zombi U from Ubi Soft and Call of Duty from Activision, because developers had to some what show Nintendo some respect early on. When you sell 100 million the previous generation you get the benefit of the doubt a little bit. 

NX is following the Wii U though. It's another console that's several years behind the other two like the Wii U was. And you can't really run the same game on the handheld vs the console because the power gap between them is too large. Sure you can make versions for both but it likely requires a different dev team. Which isn't that different from the Wii U-3DS of today. What exactly is so appealling about this to a third party that doesn't really think much of Nintendo to begin with? 

The bottom line though is the PS4 will have 40+ million install base and XBox One past 20 million before Nintendo sells even one of these, and no firmware/development environment changes that.