Ex-Ubisoft Dev: Direct ports from PS4/Xbox One to Nintendo Switch not possible

[DonFerrari]

potato_hamster said:

DonFerrari said:

problem isn't going to be the graphics being lower than 720p (upscaled) the problem will be how much compromise are devs willing to take to port the games and the sales they need to get to justificate it

I swear some people think it's literally a matter of adjusting some sliders to get a PS4 game running well on the xbox one, and devs will just have to adjust those same sliders to make the game work for the Switch.

This is not the case.

There is a LOT more that goes into optimizing a game for a platform than adjusting engine settings. We're talking months and months of work for entire development teams. The bigger the performance disparity, the more work you will have to do to basically simplify the game in order to get it to run. You're talking things like reducing the polygon count of all 3D objects, simplifying the animation and rigging, remastering all of the sound to be lower quality, removing/reducing enemies, simplifying AI (if possible), and simplifying or reducing rendering techniques, etc. Sometimes this means cutting entire features because they're not worth the effort, or simply won't on the limited resource budget it has available to it. This, of course, is ignoring developing your engine to support the two running modes of the switch, which for many developers they'll have to do themselves.

All this time in VGC have led me to believe that devs didn't port due to ill sentiments, because they only have to put one line command "compile for ***" and the game would be automaticaly ported. Why did you come just to give me this harsh truth?