An argument I often see leveraged against the Switch is that third party games "don't sell on it", and that because many games sell better on PS4, that means their Switch sales are bad and there's no reason to keep bringing them over.
This reasoning, however, doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Let's cast our memories back to the Wii. 5 Call of Duty games were ported to the Wii from 2006 to 2011. With the exception of COD3, these all sold less than 2 million, yet they kept coming, year after year. If they weren't profitable, Activision would've called it quits after 1 or 2. Sure, sales were a fraction of the PS3 and 360 versions, but that didn't matter; they obviously did well enough to earn money.
Generally speaking, it's not all that expensive to port a game that already exists. The game itself may need to sell millions in total to turn a profit, but a port might only need to sell, say, 500k to recoup the costs of conversion.
Take Skyrim on Switch; it's well on its way to cruise comfortably passed the million mark, (if it hasn't already) and while it probably won't sell as much as the PS4 version, it doesn't need to; as a port, it could likely do 800k lifetime and still turn a profit for Bethesda, and at the end of the day that's what matters, not whether it's the best selling version, but whether it makes money.
Now, obviously there are other factors, like how difficult a specific game would be to port. But the arguments that "oh it sold less on Switch so it wasn't successful" or "it wouldn't sell as much as the PS4 version so why bother" are fundamentally flawed and illogical.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 01 July 2018
