April fools day is approaching and I'm sure there will be (and already have been) lots of 'NX' leaks surfacing. This post is to help clear things up.
Firstly, I am not a video game developer but have a few friends who work in the industry. Secondly, what I'm about to share is second-hand information (from these people) and most of them do not work directly with Nintendo. Despite this I am 99% sure they would not share false information with me, as I have known most of them a long time and they would not benefit from spreading false information.
This is what I know about the NX and what I can share with you:
- You are extremely unlikely to get any photo leaks before the NX is announced officially by Nintendo. The studios (that I know of) that are building / porting to NX only have access to software. Some of these are not particularly small studios either.
- Based on the length of development cycles / porting time - if the NX launches this year, then most third party games will not be available until early - mid 2017. Software / frameworks are great to get a head start, but they won't even consider finalizing a game until it's been fully tested on hardware.
- Developers who claim to have signed an NDA with Nintendo are most probably lying. The studio will be under NDA with Nintendo and the developers/designers will be under some form of NDA from their studio (not Nintendo). The only exception would be small indie developers and it's very unlikely Nintendo would provide them with a development kit until after the reveal.
- NX games will be able to share information across multiple devices. I am not 100% sure what type of information this will be, but the functionality is (apparently) available to third party developers.
Remember, April fools day is very soon and people will go to extreme lengths to fool others. Also, nearly all developers and designers appreciate their jobs and will not intentionally risk their careers just to give unknown people on the internet a couple of months jump on information.
I hope that this information is useful despite it probably not the 'leak' you wanted.
Update: I'm going to try and get verified by a moderator before posting any more. I just have to work out the logistics.
Update 2: I've now been verified. I'll be posting after the April Fools lockdown.