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Feral Interactive on the benefits and challenges of porting to Switch, and ports that drop features

The king of Switch ports?
by rawmeatcowboy
04 January 2020
GN Version 5.0

Feral Interactive has a number of high-profile Switch ports under their belt, and they're often praised for the work they do on their projects. In an interview with Nintendo Life, Edwin Smith of Feral Interactive talks about what goes into the porting process, and also mentions why his team works hard to make sure all features from other versions remain intact.

"Having a single piece of hardware to target simplifies the development and QA tasks, all other things being equal. Having said that, all other things are rarely equal…the Switch CPU is not as powerful as most recent mobile handsets so you have to eke out of it all the performance you can and that means lots of performance analysis and optimization, and that takes time and effort.

...There are a number of factors in that process, not least our enthusiasm for the game as a game. But also, technical feasibility, sales potential, platform suitability, code quality, etc. If we are unable to port a game to the level of quality we wish to achieve, then we do not proceed, and occasionally that has happened. You see quite a few ports, which have dropped a number of features from the original game or else are released to run on a limited range of the latest hardware. We think that is self-defeating in that it generates disappointment rather than enjoyment."

[Link]