Why design UIs that don’t work with your hardware?

Lionzinio

Why does NI persist in designing its software so that it can’t be used on their own hardware?

The Massive X player relies on an XY pad to really have any effect beyond being a presets browser.

And now the neat looking Absynth presets mapper is unusable via NI hardware. As are all of the controls for the Synth.

What is the point of having an NKS system if NI’s own software remains immune to it?

It’s as if the software designers never even look at NI’s hardware.

Is this something that is even considered at NI?

Matthew_NI

There can be a few reasons.

Firstly, we wouldn't necessarily want to limit what a new piece of software is capable of simply because our pre-existing hardware (that we cannot change) doesn't have feature XYZ. That would be true regardless of usage numbers, but it is also the case that we have many more users of our software than we do our hardware.

Secondly, while there have been discussions about XY functionality on hardware in the past (Massive is not the only piece of content with XY) it's never quite risen to the top of the list. Such additions cost money, and then there arise valid questions about if users would willingly pay for such increases (given that not all content would use it). Until now, the answer has been no. One day, the answer may be yes. But this is more specific to XY, and your question is more general, so I'd refer back to my prior point.

Thirdly - another specific (and good) example of yours is the Absynth browser. Of course you can browse Absynth presets on the hardware, but you're likely referring to the 2D map. For truly effective hardware control of such a feature, you'd need a touchscreen, which again we do not have (yet at least. But it would be sad to limit software for that reason alone. And then it would be a highly custom integration (no other browser has this) that shows up differently on the hardware to the pre-existing browser used by hundreds of other titles, which could be jarring.

You mention "as are all of the controls for the Synth". Absynth 6 is the same as Absynth 5 in this regard; it can be hosted in Komplete Kontrol like any other NKS VST, and controlled by many different hardware controllers. The Absynth paradigm is slightly different, you have to assign parameters to macros and then those macros can be controlled by hardware.

"What is the point of having an NKS system if NI’s own software remains immune to it?"

I'm not sure I agree that this is what's happening.