Miyamoto: Nintendo Waiting to Reveal NX Because of "Idea"

[DonFerrari]

MrCkurab said:

DonFerrari said:

Errrrr... no way in hell a console take 5 years to be developed and released.

They seem to take 5 years because after release of a console the P&D team start to look at what they want to be their next console. So I would cut it down to less than 2 years for the console developing (with 1 year already having prototypes and specs).

And games for new gen are developed at target specs and only after having dev kit it's optimized for it... so nope, that shouldn't impact that much the release of games for NX or even the console itself.

The only reason for several postpones on the console itself would be wanting technology not mature enough to be part of the console or not knowing exactly what you want to dev.

Ehhm, yes they do.
From the first concepts to final release the standard time is about 5 years, give or take a few.
Yes, if you want/need to be faster that is quite possible, and yes, the first years are very slow with a small team as the new console isnt priority yet. But under normal circumstances you can assume that the work on a new console begins about 6 month after the release of the last. Only notable difference in the last decades was on of the old Xbox-models if I recall correctly.
This process can be accelerated, eg. put more people to it early on, dont experiment that much and specify the prototypes faster, etc...
but the balancing of features, tech, price, specs, software, os, games, etc... still takes a whole lot of time.
At the same time the whole thing must be communicated with third parties, you need to prepare marketing, and you have to take care of your current buisness, as I said a f*ckton of work that needs to be coordinated between a myriad of people and companies and subsidiaries and much more.

There are hundreds of reasons why a console is or can be postponed, same with games, especially if they are developed for new hardware, trust me, I actually work in game development, I know this stuff! Its fun yes, but it sure as hell aint easy!

If in a 5 years you take 2 to 3 years at a very slow pace just throwing ideas and concept you can't really say the development takes 5 year... as I said, it start basically as soon as they release one console up to the release of the next one. Will you say then that Xbox One took 10 years to be developed? Nope... it took they 2-3 years and the others were just concepts and technology assessment.