And throwing the Lite Switch version of Witcher 3 onto the new power upgrade model wouldn’t take months either…lol that not what we are discussing here and you know it
They do. They just usually happen during original development. One target for main development, port it to others along the way with different teams.
It’s based on how many platforms a publisher/dev team want to focus resources/efforts on. There are finite resources/time. Especially big titles. Not just devoted for original development, but resources you need to add for post release support…for each platform.
Sometimes xbox/ps developed games skip pc. (And port later)
Sometimes ps/pc developed games skip xbox. (And port later)
It’s not about something being “too hard/too different”. It’s just picking and choosing and focusing on the platforms that will give you the biggest returns. Ps3 was notoriously a pain to port pc/Xbox developed games to…didn’t stop them cause the ps platform for their games promised too great of reward to ignore.
This is why Nintendo machines are usually skipped in the original development. And often even skipped when it comes to later porting. Usually won’t provide big enough returns for the effort (which isn’t TOO HARD, it’s just extra)
I liken Nintendo 3rd party support to EA Madden on PC.
EA decided not to bother porting Madden to the PC from 2008-2018. Not because it was too hard to make their game work on a pc (they could have easily dumped the xbox360/Xbox one version on high end pcs like you say lol)
They didn’t bother because the demand/sales expectations weren’t there to spend resources that could be better used elsewhere.
And when they did finally decide to support the PC again, it was a lower effort and missing features found on other platforms (sound familiar?)
No more work than any other port to different architecture. People keep telling me how scalable game development is these days anyways. Yes, it requires more ingenuity and tricks to port to more limited hardware, more concessions made. But that doesn’t necessarily mean significant more time, more people (which is the cost factor)
You are telling me that if the Witcher 3 had never been ported to the current Switch, but they decided to port it to just this new upgrade model…that it would have taken much less time and people than it did? Sorry, I just don’t believe that. Considering it’s 2023 instead of 2019, they would attempt some sort of XboxOne/Series X hybrid with the new enhancements and such.
It would cost about the same resources/time for the publisher I’m betting.