Ori dev: ‘Nintendo NX will have no software support at launch’

The platform holders’ obsession over keeping their new consoles a surprise is damaging their relationships with devs, the head of Moon Studios has argued.

Thomas Mahler, CEO of the Ori and the Blind Forest creator, took to a NeoGAF discussion about the mystery of Nintendo’s upcoming NX console to air his complaints.

“This is actually the single most annoying thing for every dev out there,” he criticised.

“Every hardware manufacturer is treating their dev kits and unreleased consoles like they’re the second coming and are insanely secretive about it to a stupid degree in today’s time.

“It’s not even that the hardware isn’t finished (duh), but you could at least give me the goddamn specs, so we’d know what to build shit for.”

Although he clarified that his comments applied to Sony and Xbox as well as Nintendo, the company’s upcoming hardware was zeroed in upon for a direct warning.

“What’s needed to sell hardware is goddamn good software,” Mahler stated.

“With Nintendo not having any dev kits out there at this point, and probably even wanting to sell it in 2016, I can already guarantee that they’ll just not have any software support, since nobody can just jumble games together in less than a year. I mean, you can, but it’ll be garbage.”

Continuing his rant, Mahler also took the time to say that working together with tools firms and studios should be considered by hardware manufacturers as early as possible.

“Get Unity and Epic to support these consoles way ahead of release,” he advised. “By the time the console launches, it should be easy for developers to develop games for these systems, things shouldn’t just only start at this point.

“I want the goddamn dev kits or at least proper hardware specs ideally two years before release – keep all the developers updated, start a forum where devs can chat and figure out all the problems everyone’s having, instead of everyone just having to deal with it.

“None of that’s happening anywhere and it’s just brain-damaged.”