Diablo III took 9 months to port to Nintendo Switch

[superchunk]

trent44 said:

https://kotaku.com/the-diablo-iii-switch-port-took-nine-months-1828400479

Just so people have an idea as to just how long it takes to port a big game to Nintendo Switch.

This also means a lot of late ports coming to Nintendo Switch this fall/next year probably weren't even started being worked on until sometime after December 2017...

 

This does not draw the conclusions you state. 

Reading the article, it states the complexity was with the "conversion on the graphics side" and that along with in unknown number of engineers in the primary team, it had "8 to 9" folks from Blizzard directly. What it doesn't tell you is how Switch work was prioritized with other work going on or in what capacity these folks all helped out. It also isn't clear how much of this work paved the way for an easier port of other Blizzard games. Did they or Nintendo create any new tooling that makes this work easier for example.

Fact is, every new generation we see games start of with more issues and taking longer and then as developers get comfortable with the tools as well as build new tooling, they all improve in quality and decrease in development time.

I would expect next games to be faster overall with lower investment needed.