couchmonkey said:
I say so what? Downgrade away, as long as you can make a fun game at the end of the day. I am curious if Diablo 3 was downgraded for PS 3 / Xbox 360, as it seems Switcshould be competitive with ,those two, but anyways, I will also gladly take downgrades of a few other selectAAA games if anyone cares to make them. Overall, I admit there is no point in downporting every aaa game on the market, but I also think the right games should beconsidered. Overwatch would be a difficult pirt, but iI think it would kill on Switch, for example. |
Downgrading costs time and money. It makes the development cost for posting a PS4 game to Switch higher than the cost of porting a PS4 game to Xbox One for example. All on a platform where it's completely reasonable to expect much lower sales than you can expect to get on either PS4 or Xbox One. That makes a difficult sell.
Let me just give you an example. I was part of the team that developed the latest game of a series for PS3/Xbox 360, and during development, we created both versions simultaneously. They used the same assets, the same models, the same animation, the same rigging, very similar rendering effects, the same audio, etc. When a graphic artist of a 3D artist made an asset, it worked on both platforms. The bulk of the development took place over a little over a year period since we could use assets from the previous game. After that game was done and shipped, we were approached by Sony about making a Vita port, so we did. So the same size team, with the same development period worked on taking a game that was already completed, getting it to work on Vita, and then adding a handful of vita-specific features that used the touchscreen, touch pad and gyroscopic controls. That also took a little over a year, and forced us to cut a couple of extra content things the PS3 and Xbox 360 had in order to meet the deadline. That's how much extra work it was to "just downgrade the game". Now, while the disparity between the Switch and PS4 isn't as great as the disparity between PS3 and Vita, much of the same work still has to be done, and it still takes the same amount of time and money to complete.
