3 solutions for AAA third parties on switch

[DonFerrari]

irstupid said:

I'll let the people in charge of said companies tell their developers to develop for Switch.

If the Switch continues to sell and games continue to sell well on the system, they will be FORCED to make games for the switch. The development costs for a switch game is less than for the other consoles, so similar to how every company started making phone games, they will start making switch games.

Money talks more than any dev's desire for power and pushing the limits.

Edit: Tell me what do you think will happen if at a board meeting a developer says they want 50 million to make a game for the PS4 and projected sales give them a 20 million profit. Meanwhile the board looks at another game that was sold on the switch that cost only 5 million and sales gave them a profit of 20 million as well. Risk vs. reward they will not be given the choice to make what they want. They will be given a smaller budget and told to make the game Switch playable.

But in this case they would also have to see if porting this 5M game to PS4/X1/PC returns good profit or it would just be useless money spent.

MajorMalfunction said:

PAOerfulone said:

But it's more profit, nonetheless.

If they were losing money on the platform, then it makes sense. But if the money and profit is there, then that's just a wasted opportunity.

Wouldn't  company rather be making X amount of money across 3 platforms instead of Y amount of money across 2 if X>Y?

It's opportunity cost. It's not just a decision between Switch SKU / No Switch SKU, it's Switch SKU or doing anything else that is profitable. Even making a mobile game is a choice, and it's a choice they have because they haven't spent the money yet. Switch is also expensive to publish on. $20 for a 32 GB cart and all that. There's the opportunity cost of using development resources and the dollar cost of printing games to sell. To make the same total profit, publishers must sell about 45% more on Switch, dollar for dollar. With only Skyrim making past the 1 million mark, many AAA games will likely not do that.

DonFerrari said:

B

At least they have been getting good games that need less power due to their good sales on the platform.

Yeah, that's a good thing. It's come to my attention that Switch kinda sucks for AAA third party games. You can get them cheaper and get 60 FPS on PC or PS4/XB1 99% of the time. It also won't drop to quarter resolution when things get heavy. More games like Octopath Traveler. That's what sells. AAA games is dead to me, and dead to the AAA industry it seems. There is exactly one AAA game to break a million on Switch AFAIK: fucking Skyrim Remastered.

Well some AAA have sold enough to pay off as well, but I don't think most would though.