Devkit Questions

Question

There's been a couple of questions relating to devkits, and console development details. Specifically, one asking What comes with a SDK, what language is used in an unreleased console, and alternatives to using a devkit. As brought up in chat, many of these questions cannot be answered without breaking an NDA, and if you have the devkit already, there's better (and legally safer) places to ask questions other than gamedev.SE.

To quote Josh Petrie's comment from chat: "Most of the time I feel people ask because they want to "copy the pros" feeling that that is useful, but not understanding that professionals and hobbyists have wildly different needs. Or they want to "eventually port" their games." The in-chat discussion begins here.

Answer 1

Here's my full position on the subject:

I don't particular like dev-kit oriented questions, but I'm not entirely sure (especially thinking about it after the brief discussion in chat) that they're "bad" in the sense of "we should close them and disallow them." I'm more concerned that they tend to be (in my experience within other game development communities) symptomatic of a flawed thought process, one that is focused on mimicking the procedures and processes used by professional developers in at attempt to grow as a developer.

I think there is a legitimate opportunity for education there, so we should not necessarily close the question but hopefully, through comments or discussion in chat, find out why the poster is asking the question in the first place and then see if we can't direct them appropriately.