Third party Switch ports don't necessarily need to sell as much as PS4 to be successful

[DonFerrari]

pokoko said:
"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."

No one enters business to break even.

This argument seems to be centered on the idea that turning a profit alone is enough to deem a project a success. It's not. The goal of a business is to leverage assets so that they deliver the most ROI possible. This is especially true in game development, where developers themselves are the most important resource. Developer time must be used wisely.

Resource management is the core of business. It's a lot more complicated than "if you can turn a profit then you should do it."

When a game can take even 5 years to be made, resources management is very critical. With the sales of Switch and the ports we can expect to see more and more ports, almost any time it is possible. But you are totally right, it isn't just breaking even, they need to make enough profit that it makes more sense to make the port than anything else.

Mnementh said:

DonFerrari said:

Yep I agree that just "profiting" isn't enough. It need to profit enough to be a good choice against other uses of that invesment (like make DLCs).

Your evidence is on a very small sample of titles choosen to go to Switch because they would do good there. Or do you think if every single game was ported to Switch they would tie in sales with X1?

I present only data, not a theory. And we don't have more data-points, because these are the ported games. If more games go multiplat between the three (like Wolfenstein, Bomberman, Minecraft, FIFA 19 and so on) we have more data-points to see in which direction this develops.

A pool this small can be easily distorted. I bet we could pick several games on this gen that X1 sold very close to PS4 even with PS4 for most time getting 2x1 on HW. Or consider games that sell most in a single market and that distort the notion of WW HW.