Depends but likely difficult (Gaming)

by Blackt1g3r , Login is from an untrusted domain in MN, Monday, August 10, 2020, 17:19 (1634 days ago) @ yakaman

Just speculate: if a AAA game costs 1 unit to develop (let's call it 50 people full time for 3 years, whatever, 150 man-years), is it like a 10% effort to do what you (and BlackTiger) have described? Like, 1 unit to make on XBox, 1.05 units to port to PC, 1.15 units to port to PS, 1.20 units to port to switch).

Just some napkin math here, but a quick google indicates the development cost of Destiny was around $140M. If it’s 5% more to port a game to another platform that’s $7M! In reality though, the cost to port to another platform isn’t that simple to calculate. Depending on the game, relying on platform-specific features might significantly speed up development time and it’s much more likely to have a big impact on smaller games than it does on larger games. Maybe it’s like 5% more for a AAA game, but for an indie it might be 25%-50% for example. Something like Unreal engine can smooth out the cross-platform differences but it requires a engine-specific knowledge rather than general programming knowledge and making the engine do what your game needs to do might be more difficult than just writing your own engine code depending on the game.