Topic: NX Development Kits Being Distributed

[Shaymin]

And a new hub for Nintendo developers opens.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/41325/nx-development-kits-being-distributed

Although Nintendo will not be talking about the NX platform until next year, sources indicate devkits are in the wild.

A report in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required; reproduction) has announced that the dev kits for the NX have been distributed to key partners. The article claims that the NX devices would use "industry-leading chips" for their processors, and that a mobile (handheld) and a TV console are both in development.

At the same time, Nintendo announced a new development support website at developer.nintendo.com to support existing and new platforms.

[Soren]

Hopefully devs get actual documentation and support this time around.

[TOPHATANT123]

Now we wait for the fake leaks to roll in.

[kokumaker]

Very interesting. The Wii U may end up having the shortest console lifespan ever. It's still a wonderful system, but I hope Nintendo finds much more success with the next one.

[TOPHATANT123]

Wii U should have the same lifespan of the original Xbox when all said is done. I would say the virtual boy is also technically a console since it certainly isn't a handheld.

[Ian Sane]

A normal console lifespan has been five years and the Wii U will last four which as Tophatant said is the same as the Xbox.  It also beats out the Saturn and Dreamcast and infamous flops like the 3DO and Jaguar.  The Dreamcast didn't even last two years in North America before it was discontinued so the Wii U isn't anywhere near the shortest lifespan.

So Nintendo is still going to stubbornly stick to that outrageous Wii U price, right?  Is it going to stay $300 until the NX console comes out?  I can actually see that happening.  This isn't even like some rumour on a fan site.  The Wall Street fuckin' Journal is reporting it.  For all intents and purposes it has officially been revealed that the Wii U is getting replaced so how do they expect people to buy the thing this Christmas at full price?  The jig is up!  Cut the damn price!

Oh and this is more or less a confirmation about the two platforms, one OS thing, isn't it?

[Luigi Dude]

There's also the DS being released at the end of 2004, which was less then 4 years after the GBA was released.  Yeah it still had a lot of games that got released in 2005, and Nintendo called the DS just a third pillar when it was launch, but for all purposes, the DS was meant with the clear intention at Nintendo to replace the GBA and be the system to stop Sony from stealing their market with the PSP.

So the Wii U wouldn't even be the first Nintendo system to last 4 years before its successor was released and the GBA was doing much better as well.

Oh and this is more or less a confirmation about the two platforms, one OS thing, isn't it?

Pretty much, it fits Iwata's comments and Nintendo merging their handheld and home console hardware teams a few years ago very well.  It the best way for Nintendo to continue supporting 2 systems since it's allows easier development for games that receive handheld and home console version and give them the option to even outright release a game on both platforms at once.

[Compeau]

Guys, industry-leading chips have been in Nintendo systems all along!

[Enner]

2016?! I don't know if I'm read yet!
Granted, the WSJ article only mentions 2016 as the earliest time frame.


This is a recap of all the things we've been mulling over the past year. Now they have more weight behind them due to WSJ's sources.

[Mop it up]

I guess this is another sign that November 2016 could be the launch.

[Mythtendo]

The system is not coming out in 2016, unless the launch only has a handful of games and those are all ports of existing games since only a handful of developers are just now getting development kits. A 2017 release is more likely.

It's very good news that the development kits are using top of the line chips. This could mean the NX is the first Nintendo console since the GameCube to be about equal to its rivals (since Wii was much weaker than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and Wii U is weaker than Xbox One and PlayStation 4).

Soren, Nintendo provided documentation and good support to third parties with Wii U. It's Sony that has the reputation for not giving documentation to developers (especially with the PS2, Sony was infamous for intentionally withholding information about it so their first party games had an advantage).

[Soren]

Soren, Nintendo provided documentation and good support to third parties with Wii U.

Hmmmm...

Nintendo had provided an integration of their development tools into Visual Studio - the de facto standard for development - but it didn't work, not even close. So time was spent trying to get this fixed up, while reporting the issue to the platform holder. Eventually we received a solution from Nintendo via another third-party company who had also been working on this issue for a while.

Another curious thing to note at this point was that over the course of six months we received multiple different development kits in a variety of colours, none of which revealed why they were different from the previous one. We knew that there were some hardware bugs that were being fixed, but the release notes rarely stated what had changed - we just had to take the new ones and get them working with our code again, consuming valuable development time.

Now that the game was up and running on the console we could start developing features that would use the new controllers and make our game stand out on the platform. But soon after starting this we ran into some issues that the (minimal) documentation didn't cover, so we asked questions of our local Nintendo support team. They didn't know the answers so they said they would check with the developers in Japan and we waited for a reply. And we waited. And we waited.

After about a week of chasing we heard back from the support team that they had received an answer from Japan, which they emailed to us. The reply was in the form of a few sentences of very broken English that didn't really answer the question that we had asked in the first place. So we went back to them asking for clarification, which took another week or so to come back. After the second delay we asked why it was taking to long for replies to come back from Japan, were they very busy? The local support team said no, it's just that any questions had to be sent off for translation into Japanese, then sent to the developers, who replied and then the replies were translated back to English and sent back to us. With timezone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week !

[ShyGuy]

My uncle who works for Nintendo says that F-Zero and Mother 3 HD are launch titles, plus Pokemon MMO.

[sudoshuff]

The system is not coming out in 2016...

I still cannot see it coming out in 2016.  There is only a single analyst in the article who is "increasingly of the idea" that it "might launch" in 2016.  The importance of the article is that dev kits are out already, and there is much more weight behind the idea of a hybrid console/handheld according to WSJ sources.  Also...industry leading chips?  That's pretty cool.

[Shaymin]

We'll see a hybrid PS5/XB2 before we see a Nintendo hybrid.

[NWR_insanolord]

The system is not coming out in 2016...

I still cannot see it coming out in 2016.  There is only a single analyst in the article who is "increasingly of the idea" that it "might launch" in 2016.  The importance of the article is that dev kits are out already, and there is much more weight behind the idea of a hybrid console/handheld according to WSJ sources.  Also...industry leading chips?  That's pretty cool.

What we're hearing sounds more like a shared OS and ecosystem than a true hybrid. Hybrid hardware doesn't make sense for Nintendo; too many compromises would have to be made, and they'd much rather sell you multiple systems than just the one.