FF7 Rebirth has reportedly sold half what Remake did in the same timeframe

[curl-6]

Farsala said:

curl-6 said:

A port of FF7 would be a pretty safe bet to make a return, and Switch ports aren't that expensive or risky given we've seen everything from Doom to Grounded to Outer Worlds to Sniper Elite to Kingdom Come Deliverance make the jump.

That Switch 2 will offer a worthwhile market is also a reasonably safe bet. Nothing's guaranteed, of course, but at this stage its safer to assume success than failure.

That doesn't explain why all the other games didn't get ported. Just like a lot of Japanese devs find Xbox to be unpalatable for profit for their games, a lot of western devs found the Switch to be unpalatable.

If it was easy and inexpensive then the Switch would have just as strong 3rd party support as PS or PC gets, especially with the massive install base taken into account.

Easy and inexpensive are relative; it's easy and cheap enough that literally hundreds of PS4 games have been ported to Switch.

There are bottlenecks in production though; the main studios hands may be full already making the PS/Xbox/PC versions, so Switch ports are typically handled by specialized porting devs like Panic Button or Saber, and there's a limited number of those with a limited amount of manpower.

You're missing the point though; porting a finished game, even across a power gap like PS4 to Switch or PS5 to where the Switch successor is estimated to be, is vastly cheaper than making a game in the first place. If a game needed millions to break even on its own, a port may only need a few hundred k.