#porting games

[askagamedev]

Is classic game porting/remastering becoming its own specialization? What I mean is, of course it's happening more these days, so/but is space growing to be someone who specializes in these projects? Or is it still niche enough that the small number of teams/staff who do it will continue to do it?

The answer here is "kind of". Here's the main issue - game development is expensive. AAA studios are expensive and cost a lot to run, assigning a AAA studio a remake/port project is not really worth it when compared to the estimated return on investment. Instead, what game publishers often do is contract out the remakes/port job to an independent third-party studio. This has two major benefits.

First, it costs notably less than the publisher putting their own internal AAA studios on it. When you're doing a remake/port, you often don't need super high fidelity assets or extremely large scope - the majority of the gameplay design and systems already exist. Contracting the project out to an external studio means the publisher can just pay a flat amount and doesn't have to worry about things hiring new people, handling benefits, setting up the studio, etc. The external studio gets to do that, and often has their own stuff in place already. This works very well for the independent studios too - they can take jobs like this in order to pay the bills and fund their own game development. Behaviour, independent developer of Dead by Daylight, also has a second team that does work like porting and remakes/ports for other studios. Their porting and remake team provides the income to keep the studio afloat during leaner times.

Second, it allows the publisher to give these external studios a chance to prove themselves - can they deliver a promised project in time, budget, and quality? If they can, this studio may be worth acquiring or working with again. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was developed by Japanese independent studio Grezzo, but this is far from their first game for Nintendo. They ported Ocarina of Time 3D, Majora's Mask 3D, and Luigi's Mansion for the 3DS, and they did the port for Link's Awakening to the Switch. The team that built Sonic Mania first proved themselves to Sega by doing iOS ports of Sonic CD, Sonic 1, and Sonic 2 before being given the Sonic Mania project.

With these two reasons in mind, doing remakes/ports do two things. First, they can earn money to pay the bills in a situation where it isn't worth it for the publishers to build them internally, allowing these studios to build their own projects or just have a more stable sustainable situation. Second, it provides a "minor league" situation where these external studios can prove their ability to the publisher in a lower-stakes situation in order to be entrusted with a higher and more interesting project later. As long as remakes and ports of games continue to do well, this kind of work will be in demand.

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[askagamedev]

With the announcement of the Switch 2 I was wondering how do games for an older version of a console work on a newer version of the same console? Will they run better from the start or do the devs have to go back and update or unlock something for it to work better?

It depends on how they go to the new platform. There are two main ways of doing this - porting the game project to the new platform or emulating the old game on the new platform.

Porting the game basically means taking the old code and assets and making them run on the new hardware. This involves getting the old game running natively (i.e. the game itself compiles, links, and runs) on the Switch 2. This is usually the choice for newer games and projects - stuff that's more recent usually doesn't rely on obsolete tools or a workflow that is no longer supported. Since we can still use the tools that the game was built with, we (or some contracting studio) can get it working on the new hardware.

Emulating the game means building a virtual machine around the original game that pretends to be the original hardware and modifies the inputs and outputs to and from the game. Emulation is typically done when the game development workflow is no longer feasible - e.g. the game was built with ancient tools on ancient hardware that is no longer supported anywhere. Because we can't modify the original game, we need to build a box around it that we can modify and run the original game within that box. [Click Here] for an an older post that goes into more depth about how virtual machines and emulation work.

The decision on whether to port or emulate is typically driven by what is easiest and most cost-effective. Porting is usually preferred to emulation if available, because it means that the porting team has access to tools, assets, and possibly even the original dev team to answer questions. Emulation means that any gameplay changes tend to be very difficult since rebuilding the original game is probably unfeasible.

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[askagamedev]

An official release of the Kotor 2 missing content DLC/patch had been promised, then pulled back. It had been enough of the promise that a free game was offered to people who had bought the Kotor 2 rerelease. Why does that kind of rollback on an official plan happen? How is the decision to stop weighed against free stuff and bad PR?

I think it would help to provide a little more context as to what is going on.

Way back in 2004, a game called KOTOR 2 shipped and was played by a lot of players. Many players did not like the ending, but the game had been in development for less than a year and Obsidian were on the hook to ship the game by the deadline. The game was regarded by many players as a flawed gem.

Years later, modders would discover a whole bunch of unfinished endgame content in [KOTOR 2's original files]. Some of them collaborated to unlock, fill out, debug, and finish that content and restore it. This was released for the PC as an unofficial fan mod called The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification in 2009 and has had several updates since.

In 2015 Aspyr Media, a smaller game publisher and developer, obtained the rights to port old Bioware games and began releasing titles like KOTOR, KOTOR 2, and Jade Empire to platforms like iOS, Linux, and Steam. It was around this time that Aspyr began working with the mod team responsible for the Restored Content Mod mentioned above, all in hopes of bringing the mod to these other platforms. The DLC was never really Aspyr's work, it was the mod team working with Aspyr to bring that content to Aspyr's Switch port of KOTOR 2. Eight years later, Aspyr announced that things had fallen through and the Restored Content DLC was cancelled.

It sounds like what happened was that something essential fell apart along the way and there was really no way to complete the work in a timely and legal fashion. One of the original modders posted to reddit after the announcement was made and said "Aspyr did nothing wrong. Quote me on that. Shame it ended the way it did... I have nothing but good things to say about Aspyr and our cooperation over the past eight years". I suspect that, had the DLC been completable within reasonable circumstances, they would have done so. But there's a lot of potential issues that could have stopped them - the license may have expired, it may have been a Nintendo certification thing, the mod team could have fallen apart, there could have been some major legal liability that came to light, it could be the financial trouble currently hitting Embracer Group (Aspyr's owner as of 2001), or any of a number of things. The only people who know for sure are the mod team and Aspyr. I suspect they are all under NDA, so I doubt they will be telling.

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[askagamedev]

Since Skyrim has done so well that Bethesda gave it multiple rereleases, why not make new content for the game? By that, I mean dlc in the vein of Dawngaurd and Dragonborn.

It's because the dev team is busy working on Elder Scrolls VI. Ports to other platforms like that are often handled by external contractor studios and not by the original dev team. Skyrim is no exception - Escalation Studios did the Skyrim VR port and Iron Galaxy did the Skyrim Switch port. The Elder Scrolls dev team is deep into developing the next game.

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[askagamedev]

Just saw God of War for preorder on Steam and I have to ask why you think Sony allowed this. The PS4 is still highly relevant to both consumers and gamedevs. I can only think that making AAA/AAAA games is now so expensive that timed exclusivity is the only sensible way to make an exclusive or they want to get PC users invested in the franchise so they are more likely to buy a PS5 for Ragnarok.

I think that it's important to differentiate the view of a particular game in a franchise from the franchise itself. Sony's view of God of War 2018 as a system seller has changed over time. God of War was originally released for the PS4 in 2018. The PC version isn't scheduled to launch until January of 2022, making a time gap of over three years between releases. This means that the vast majority of people who would consider buying the game for the PS4 have already bought it. Any further sales by bringing the game to PC would primarily be to customers who would not have gotten it for PS4 to begin with.

Remember, [the majority of sales for a game happen within the first three months of launch]. The last content released for God of War 2018 was some one-year anniversary content released in 2019, with avatars and a PS4 theme. The game has been left to gather dust for over two years since then. Any additional PS4 sales it gets nowadays are essentially the last drips and dregs of people finally getting around to it. There just aren’t many more sales that Sony can wring out of God of War 2018 for PS4. Almost everybody who wanted to buy it on that platform has bought it already. 

The PC market, on the other hand, still has a lot of potential players who might like the game but don't own a PS4. They are much more likely to give the game a try on the PC they already have, since the barrier to entry has been lowered so much. And, wouldn't you know it, GoW Ragnarok is also coming in 2022 to PS4 and PS5 for these new players who liked the game and want to play the bigger, fancier sequel. Some nonzero number of those PC players are also likely to play GoW 2018, enjoy it thoroughly, and be persuaded to pick up a PS4 or PS5 for GoW Ragnarok later in 2022. Because of this, releasing GoW 2018 on PC serves a dual purpose of selling to a mostly-untapped market (gamers who don't own a PS4 but want to play) and advertising for GoW Ragnarok at the same time.

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[askagamedev]

Is it worthwhile to release your game on platforms + stores other than Steam? (Example: Switch, Xbox, PS4, GOG, Humble). What are the fees associated with getting your game on these different platforms/stores?

It can certainly be worthwhile releasing games on new platforms. The biggest benefit to going to a new platform is that there are many players who engage with those platforms and have not played your game yet. Releasing on a new platform grants your game exposure to a large number of potential new players and sales. However, the cost of releasing a game on additional platforms is not trivial. This is where the business side comes in - is it worth spending all of that money to bring the game to the new platform?

We'll put aside the choice of cross-platform development at the start for today and consider only the paradigm of making the decision to bring a (mostly) complete game to a new platform after launch. This is often the only choice for smaller developers who are budget-constrained - they often don't have the money to buy dev kits and pay for cross-platform development until their game is actually released and earns some money back. In this situation, you've got two major sources of costs - direct costs from platform itself and indirect costs to cover all of the bug fixing, optimization, and additional work needed to pass cert.

Direct costs in this case would be the costs to establish a working relationship with the platform and the ensuing costs for hardware and certification. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all require some kind of business relationship with their licensees. They won't let just anybody make a game for their consoles - you actually have to pitch your game to them and get their approval before they will let you buy dev kits and create developer accounts. Once you set the relationship up, you must buy [dev and test kits] from them (often several thousand dollars each) in order to connect your workstations to the consoles and you will need to pay for [certification] (also often several thousand dollars) before you will be allowed to launch on that platform. Some platforms like GOG, iOS, Google Play, etc. don't require these fees, but some will still require specific hardware (e.g. Android devices, Apple devices, Mac computers for developing iOS games, etc.).

There are also indirect costs of moving to a new platform - most games that work absolutely fine on PC will have bugs and problems when brought to a new platform. Things like UI and control schemes will need to be redesigned and rebuilt even if the old game already supported controllers - certification will require very specific button icons, images, and text in the UI. The game or the assets will also likely require optimization and bug fixing because of differences in the hardware or performance issues. If your game has an online component or DLC, it will also likely require some fairly extensive work to make sure all of the old online stuff works with the platform’s online network (e.g. PSN, XBL). Many of these platforms also require additional platform-specific content such as achievements. These changes will require a non-trivial amount of development time, including time spent learning the ins and outs of the new platform itself. This additional development time must be paid for.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to bringing an existing game to the Switch (or any other given platform) than just paying some fees and getting the thumbs up. The cost can be so significant that there are several third party game studios whose entire business model is being hired guns for platform port jobs like this. The cost of bringing an existing game to a new platform is not trivial and should be carefully considered. The decision must be made based on whether you think there will be enough customers on the new platform to justify the costs of porting the game.

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[askagamedev]

When developing a game and later publishing the game to a different platform (e.g. from PC to Nintendo Switch), do most of the time studios hire a 3rd party or are they done in studio?

Porting a AAA game to a new platform after release is usually contracted out to an independent or different publisher-owned studio. This is usually because the team that built the original game is usually already working on something else. Porting an existing game to a new platform often requires fewer hands than building a whole new game, so you also don’t need to field a full sized team to do it.

In my experience, working as the primary developer on a title means that you work on the platforms that have the most crossover in technical specs. This usually means that the PC/Playstation/Xbox are developed by the same team, but any Nintendo platform is often handled separately due to its much more limited hardware capabilities. The XBone and PS4 compete pretty closely with each other, but the Switch just doesn’t have that kind of horsepower. That means that a lot of additional optimization and asset fixes must be done to make it work on the Switch - enough work that it often necessitates an additional team dedicated to doing just that work.

Smaller contract/independent studios will often do the ports themselves after launch, even if they have a publisher. This is often because they may be waiting for a deal to go through and still need to pay the bills. Launching an established game onto a new platform would be less expensive than building a whole new game, and it earns the studio some money to stay afloat while the leadership tries to close a deal for a new project. 

Big publishers often have their own porting studios like Vicarious Visions (EA) and Beenox (Activision), but there are also independent studios like Behavior that are often hired to port titles. Many studios started out by porting existing titles to new platforms in order to pay the bills while they grew and developed their own original games on the side. Blizzard Entertainment is one of the more famous examples that got its start this way in the early 1990′s. 

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[askagamedev]

With Halo MCC, Death Stranding, & (possibly, but def not confirmed) Horizon:ZD being released on PC later this year, I am curious about how hard it will be to port them given that they were designed/developed around one target platform. Aside from legal, contractual, or other factors that are not publically known, could you elaborate on the techincal challenges of porting fullly exclusive games to other/newer platforms? What kind of technical debt can these types of games incur?

The PC platform is, in different ways, both the easiest and the most challenging platform to target with a port. It’s easy because we already do our development primarily on the PC. Most studios often have some version of the game running on PC to some extent to save time and money - artists, for example, usually only need a tool to simulate the way the game will be rendered on the console and don’t need a full dev or test kit to check it while doing work-in-progress stuff. Because we use PCs so much during development, getting the game to work on a PC isn’t really that difficult. The project is already mostly working for the most part, especially if we’re porting from an Xbox platform to PC.

The difficulty used to come from getting it to work with all of the different hardware profiles and such out there. Once upon a time, the trouble was having to support lots of different kinds of hardware - these video cards have weird behavior, those sound drivers don’t work, and so on. That’s mostly gone away thanks to widespread adoption of DirectX package and the xbox controller driver to standardize inputs and drivers for everybody. There’s still some of that going on, but those cases are usually farther between and caused by strange bugs at the platform level, not at the developer level. Building a game for the PC platform in general is pretty easy just to get it functioning now.

The hard part with PC ports today is getting it to run on min-spec and low-end machines. Today, our development machines tend to be pretty beefy because we need to be able to run debug and less optimized code and tools during the development process. The majority of PC players do not have powerful gaming PCs like that; most of the time more than half of the PC gamers out there are running min-spec machines (especially in large PC markets like Asia). This means that the lion’s share of development cost for a PC port is often things like performance optimization, asset downgrades, and additional options to allow players to turn off certain graphical features for better performance. 

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