Nintendo - Games developed for PC will take about a year to port to Switch

[Pemalite]

Turkish said:

Chazore said:

Do you not understand that games are in fact made on PC, and for PC?. The ones that neevr touch PC are some exclusives that were designed for a specific branded system and OS, but most of the time a PC version exists.

Thats not entirely true. Games are made on dev kits, wile PCs may be used to create assets and stuff, it's not like games such as Horizon or Zelda are made on PC first and then down ported to PS4 or Switch. There is no .exe of Horizon at Guerilla's offices.

Developing only on a dev kit would blow out development time.
Game development needs workstation levels of performance, not anemic (Relatively) console levels of performance.

The point of a Dev kit is so that they can get the game running on the console hardware, they can debug, optimize, adjust everything so it can be the best it can be on that particular hardware set. And that also takes time to do.

Can you develop a game on a Dev-kit? Sure. But you can also develop a game on a phone or a tablet.
The caveat is that it will not allow you to be as productive as possible, especially when it comes to things like compiling.

For instance compiling a AAA game on a Phone would likely take you days, maybe even over a month.
On a Workstation with distributed compilers? Probably only talking a couple of hours.

You are right that there is no ".exe" of these games, but there also doesn't need to be one. They aren't games in a traditional package.