It is truly sad how many devs now have us port begging for games on Xbox. It shouldn't be this way, as a developer or publisher you are supposed to be capable of doing your own darn market analysis to see if a port is viable. Spoiler alert, most ports will turn a profit on Xbox unless it's either a very small indie dev with very limited development resources or a super niche genre JP game like visual novel or schmup, basically everything else is capable of making a profit these days due to the reduced porting costs brought about by Xbox and Playstation switching to PC based consoles starting with XB1/PS4, and moving even closer to PC with XS/PS5. On a small indie it probably only takes a 2-4k sales to turn a profit on the port, a bigger indie more like 10-30k sales, a AA probably 40-60k sales, and a AAA probably 150k sales at most in most cases, the more it sells over those rough break even margins the bigger the profit on the port.
A double-A Souls-like such as Phantom Blade Zero should easily be able to clear that break even point, as popular as the Souls-like genre has become, pretty much all of these Souls-likes that have reviewed even decently have sold alot of copies.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 26 May 2023
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