shikamaru317 said:
Depends on many factors honestly, the scale of the game, the engine being used, etc. What we do know is that porting is easier this gen than it used to be, thanks to PS4/XB1/PC all using similar hardware. We've heard indie devs say that it doesn't take long at all, one indie dev said they were able to dump code directly from one console to another and have it work almost immediately, and optimize it run perfectly within just a few weeks. Obviously a big AAA like FFXV would take more time and manpower, but how much more is something known only to the developers. As a hypothesis, let's say it takes a team of 30 developers 3 months to port a AAA game from PS4 to XB1 or vice-versa. The average game developer salary is $68,000 a year right now, so 1/4 of that (3 months) would be worth $17,000 per developer. $17,000 x 30 developers is $510,000 spent on the port. Final Fantasy XV sold 450k copies on XB1 in December in the US according to the NPD leaker, and the price at retail varied between $30 and $60 throughout the month, let's say the average was $45 per copy (it's likely higher than that since it was only on sale for $30 one day as I recall). Minus the retailer's cut and the price of packaging materials, let's say $38 per copy in actual profit for Square. $38 x 450,000 copies is $17 million, far more that the hypothetical $510,000 spent on the port. And that's just US sales, it has some extra sales on XB1 in other countries as well. |
That hypothetically puts 13421 copies at breakpoint. Which would be great, but not the reality for most non indie games. Type 0 HD was at ~50k for XB1 in the US and I would say that was not enough to cover the cost of porting. Otherwise any game with the potential to sell 50k on XB1/PS4/PC would be auto ported, if the higher selling version was guaranteed to make a profit. Even late ports would be viable.
Whats interesting is a game like ROTKXIII. The game got ported to XB1 in Asia, but the developers figured the sales would be too low to cover the cost in the west. Here we have a game that was already made for XB1 and all they had to do was acquire copies to sell in the west, and add to the digital store. The english localization was already done to the PS4 version, so one would think it would be really easy and cheap. Yet it wasn't released in the west.
Edit: Switch version for the west was announced before XB1 version. So its not like Sony has a deal either.
