| curl-6 said: 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. |
There is almost no scenario where your above statement even comes remotely valid, very few if any uses it as argument.
AAA 3rd party games that are on the PS4 and Switch
- Extremely small, 3rd party developers are not bringing AAA games to the Switch at a fast enough pace (or even at all) where this argument would even make sense. You have DOOM, Wolfenstein and Skyrim (a game from 2011). On Resetera, Aquamarine and ZX both said that sales of AAA games on the switch are OK but not great, I'm taking they are talking about the above titles. 3 games is not enough to make a grand statement like that, the sample size is too small. The developer and publisher talk is invalid because we don't know the true cost of anything, you're using all speculation.
Indie games on PS4 and Switch
- There are many but sales between the two are never argued because Switch sales of indie games are high and there is no real development difference between consoles.
Japanese games
- See Attack on Titan 2. Small sample size but volume sales on PS4 are not that great either for the majority of them so the argument above doesn't make sense because I'm sure that Japanese developers keep to tight budgets and the PS4 versions are taking long enough for them to break even (if they get to break even at all).
