derpysquirtle64 said:
I see you bring this up over and over again. What I can't quite understand is on which data do you base this assumption? I can be wrong but I think for most publishers breaking even or having small profits is not enough. Different publishers use different metrics to decide what target platforms will be for the game. I think there are publishers that expect 10x of the porting cost profitability to justify it. Or well, if we say the port might break even at 3K sales, but they are not interested in it if it sells 10k copies or |
I mean it is just pure logical reasoning on my part, none of us have any real data to base anything on since Japanese publishers aren't going to publicly release that data to us. My thinking is that any profit is profit. If I'm in charge of financial decisions at a game publisher, I'm always going to chose $33m in profit for a game over $30m in profit from a game, just as an example. If an Xbox port of a JP game can account for at least 10% of total sales, it is almost certainly going to be adding pure profit to a game. Porting is faster, easier, and cheaper than it has ever been in the past, due to how similar Xbox Series, PS5, and PC are to one another these days. A few months of just a small fraction of the total workforce of a developer spent porting a game to Xbox is not going to take significant enough development resources away from that developer's next brand new game to offset any profit from said Xbox port. Those Xbox sales would pay the monthly salaries of the porting team with plenty left over for pure profit from the port, which is worth alot more in the long run than the next brand new game from that studio being able to release maybe a month or two earlier as a result of having a larger workforce earlier. Or alternatively they can contract out a 3rd party porting studio to handle the Xbox port, so that no developers at the studio that made the game are required to actually port the game to Xbox. As long as Xbox sales are enough to pay the fees of said 3rd party porting studio, the JP pub is going to make profit on the Xbox port, and any profit is profit. And just putting a game on Xbox at all gives your game a chance of being chosen for an eventual late Gamepass addition, so even more profit if Xbox does make a deal for a late Gamepass addition on your game.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 24 September 2023
