That narrative was just always bullshit. Sony misread the console market just like they misread the portable market years ago. They got into their heads that AAA single player games were on the way out and PC/mobile/GaaS (same mistake many other publisher had made some years prior).
For some reason Sony is completely incapable of recognizing their advantageous position and how good they have and are dead set on becoming just another failed big publisher.
Well when you have people in leadership who are influenced by a money/growth-first mentality and not an identity-first mentality (corporate/brand-wise), you sometimes forget about lessons learned from the past and might get lax in what your strengths are. Companies like Nintendo don't seem to have these issues because they're part family-owned so there's a fixed brand identity that remains at the core no matter the generation. Even with systems that have been duds, they've always been consistent in their software offerings on those platforms. Wii U is a perfect example of this.
SIE have usually been somewhere in the middle of Nintendo and Microsoft in that regard, but usually either squarely in the middle or leaning somewhat more the Nintendo way. But I think with the overzealous chase for GAAS, the explosion in frequency for PC ports undermining the core of the console, the growing muddy messaging through obfuscation etc., they've been leaning a bit too close to modern Microsoft for my liking. And probably a good many others, too.
I'm just some random dude, but to me it's clear that Sony is completely fucking themselves long term and have no idea about what they are doing. This stuff is not that hard to predict, from day on I knew that Xbox releasing all their games on PC and putting all their focus on gamepass was a terrible idea, I could see that Nintendo unifying their development effort on a single platform was a great idea, I called that Sony completely giving up on the portable space was a massive mistake.
Yeah I am a bit surprised Sony never at least considered re-fashioning the PS Vita as a premium controller accessory for the PS4. That would've been a way to salvage the handheld and maybe the PS Portal would've been a more typical portable form-factor device that could natively run PSP & PS Vita, and PS1 games and still do the streaming of PS4 & PS5 games.
Maybe would've been a bit more expensive to make (though it's PS Vita tech on smaller nodes, which would've helped keep the pricing low, or at least in line with the PS Portal's current production costs), but the price would've justified it. At least I hope the rumored PS handheld for the PS6 is true because Sony definitely need a handheld/portable option in their console ecosystem to be more competitive with Nintendo and PC/Steam.
What is funny is that the PC boom is already over, their biggest single player IPs have already landed on PC and all those games combined made less money than Days Gone on PS4. A game Sony deemed unworthy of a sequel.
Hopefully they have made changes to the PC strategy then. Even some of the GAAS titles should remain exclusive to the console; Valve does it with their own GAAS titles on Steam, and those are very successful.
Though, I think it'd also require Sony to get rid of paid online on console; no coincidence that Helldivers 2 uptick exploded on PS5 the weekend they waived the PS+ requirement to play online. Paid online is an archaic relic of gaming's past; sub services should find other ways to justify value to customers than locking a necessity behind a paywall.
They look so low because a port costs like this for big games running on custom engines. And they are probably even including the marketing budget for the PC port there.
No; the more likely reason the costs are low is because those listed costs are only for what end-line work Nixxes are doing for the PC ports. The bulk of the costs for the PC port are probably absorbed into the main budgets considering PC versions of the games are being developed simultaneously with the PlayStation ones (Spiderman 2 and Wolverine show this to be true).
Once Nixxes adapted an engine, in future games they only have to port part of the new code for the engine that may have been added or changed since the previous game, implement the KBM controls if aren't already implemented, add widescreen support fixing any possible issue, to support for the latest GPU specific things like super sampling methods they may want to add, implement some scalability stuff and related settings, fixing the UI/HUD/cutscenes on weird resolutions, plus overall testing, tweaks and bugfixing.
IIRC, wasn't it Guerrilla who made changes to Decima to get it on PC, not Nixxes? I'd put Kojima Productions ahead of Nixxes there in that regard, too. And considering studios like Sucker Punch are the ones who made their custom engines, why wouldn't they have the majority of work put into getting the engines working on PC?
So I don't think attributing the engine adaption to Nixxes makes sense, but them likely only adding a few things like widescreen support, KB&M support etc. yeah that would fall on Nixxes. Those aspects are cheap to do, hence likely the reason behind the costs we've seen listed in the documents for the PC ports: those things are only a smaller part of the total work (and therefore costs) needed for the ports in the first place.
Consoles nowadays are pretty much PCs, and nowadays pretty much all the development of a console game is made and tested on a PC (only the final part is required to use devkits and tests kits, to ensure performance, very console specific stuff like trophies or tech stuff and bugfixing), there isn't a lot of things to change once the engine already supports PC. Just a few folks working during a few months are needed to port it.
Consoles aren't
really like PCs though; yes they use x86-64 architectures and whatnot, but even the CPUs are highly customized compared to their PC counterparts, let alone the GPUs. If game code were written "to the metal" for a console like PS5, you would not be able to run that code as-is on a Windows PC without re-compiling and extensive changes.
I know that PCs have been used for game development in the past, even in the SNES/Genesis eras etc. Back then though either only non-critical parts of the game code were done on PCs (usually in C), or the PC was using a software environment simulating that of the target console. And usually, the console still needed to be connected to the PC as the actual code would compile and run on the console devkit; the PC was just useful for writing the code, it wouldn't run it.
Modern-day dev actually extensively uses the console devkits in similar ways to what I just described: you write the code on PC in something like C++ or Python or whatever, the parts of your game code and stuff. There's some SDK package to simulate some part of the console environment to I guess parse the code or something, and you've got the devkit hooked up to the PC (wired or wirelessly) to receive the code to run/test on the devkit once it's been compiled.
So in actuality, the console devkits are used regularly and iteratively to test the code. They aren't just present for the final parts of development, otherwise the devs would have no way of knowing what parts of the game need adjusting until they've finished the vast bulk of coding. Which can be an issue, because it's usually better to iteratively test things along the way vs. the "waterfall" method (what you're describing) where you code everything in an OS/SDK environment not present on retail systems (even if you're using PC specs "equivalent" to the target console) and then spend a long process paring down the code in isolation.
I'm mainly speaking of the process for games targeting multiplatform status from Day 1 or those that are exclusive to a given console, in terms of how the PC is leveraged during development alongside devkits. Games that target PC first obviously do things differently, and probably closer to what you're describing, particularly when they then get a port going for a console.
They said that bought Nixxes and work with Iron Galaxy or Jetpak to do that PC porting job, so lead studios like Insomniac, ND and Guerrilla can focus on making games for PS and don't need to worry about the ports.
But the existence of runnable builds of Spiderman 2 and Wolverine on PC already, show this isn't 100% the case. Naughty Dog, speaking of, retooled their whole pipeline to factor in PC co-development.
People from Insomniac etc. are only required to send them the material and overview the job, plus maybe to reply some specific tech question or help with some very specific couple of complex tech engine related things they may have added to the engine for that game.
That is part of what they're doing, but is not the only thing they're doing on these ports. If it were that simple, we'd 1: be seeing more 1P releases with shorter interval periods between them, and 2: have probably seen this porting initiative take hold
much earlier.
Even when Microsoft eventually did Day 1 on PC for all games, it wasn't immediate. They took four years to reach that point, right before the launch of the Series consoles in fact.
There's no "secret lion porting work" in the side of Insomniac, and if it would exist it would be included in the budget of the ports, which isn't the case.
If final duties of the port are being handled by teams like Nixxes, then only the costs associated with their part of the work would be listed in those specific port costs. Things that fall on the original studios like Insomniac etc., would be baked into the total budget costs
aside from the ports.
And we wouldn't know that specific number because it's obfuscated.
You forgot:
-MLB 21, 22, 23, 24
-Horizon CoM
-Firewall Ultra
-Spider-Man 2
-Rise of the Ronin
Like
@Nhomnhom said, these are all either not from 1P internal studios, are games already on other platforms (like MLB), are GAAS titles (also MLB), or require a PSVR2 in order to play.
Spiderman 2 is kind of the only one that is 1P internal, non-GAAS, and doesn't require a PSVR2 that is fully exclusive to the console. At least for now, legally. We know there'll eventually be a PC port, and there is already a port for those who want to illegally access the game on that platform, due to leaks from the December ransomware hack.
