this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Yeah honestly the idea that a port should cost less because it's a worse experience is stupid. As long as effort was put in and the game is still playable and as enjoyable an experience as other platforms whoever made it has any right to charge what they see fit for that platform.
Now should people buy it? Probably not and if it doesn't run as well you can absolutely raise the argument of it was a pointless cash grab anyways but...
Being upset that a developer wants to get paid for a game no matter what platform they put it on... not a big deal
you gotta take into account that the conceptual design phase has been completely eliminated from the process. And lots of the core logic would've been ported over wholesale. one example you can find is searching about the code in the katamari ports, where there's parts of the code left behind that don't do anything, and point to ps2 libraries that don't exist in Unity.
while there's nothing revealed here on how much is just copy/pasted over, I'm sure they'd be motivated to bring over as much as they can when they were initially estimating the work needed for the project, and then test the hell out of it. A majority of the graphics engine would probably have to be remade if they didn't aim to emulate it, and would be one of the major challenges in a mobile port of a higher-end console/pc game, but the assets/resources would be copied over and no work on that beyond ensuring it looks fine on the target resolution and framerate; maybe even with the use of automated AI upscaling/downscaling to reduce that workload even further. I find it safe to assume a straight port doesn't usually require the same or more amount of work as the original
Yup the switch mortal Kombat 1 port likely used a tool to just downgrade and straight port the game over and this it didn't actually run particularly well and was a stupid and low effort port.... but someone still made that game before that was done.
So if they want to shoot themselves in the foot and cripple their own launch and game with bad performance that's their own issue and one that is a separate conversation to them charging what they think is appropriate for their brand new game.
that's kinda the crux of my spiel though, what they charge communicates what they believe the work is worth, and they're either saying the previous work is worth less now, or this lesser amount of work is worth more
I agree, they have the right to charge what they want, but what they communicate with the price feels like spitting in the face of their playerbase, which, again, they have the right to do
and yeah, MK1 on switch is rough, and feels like they just ported over as much of the graphics engine as they could, and completely turned off all the fancier effects. Then they downscaled all the assets on top of that to make it super oof