What is porting and why is it important for a video game?

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

Porting a game is something that some video game companies dread because it can be costly, and it takes time to port a game. Porting is basically taking the design of a game for one platform and then converting the game to run on a totally new platform.

Basically, it would be like taking a game that is designed for PC and turning it into an Xbox game that can run smoothly with the Xbox platform. It can be a lot of headaches and it can cost a lot in some cases, but I want to look at the biggest benefits.

Reach More Audiences

The first and most obvious reason to port a game is to reach more people. If you are dominating in the PC world and that is the only platform that your game is working on, then are you only going to have that audience.

Imagine if you could double the reach of your video game by porting it to another community of users? Porting just makes sense because the more people that you can reach, the more players that you can get for a video game.

In regard to reaching more people, porting is what makes sense because once it is ported, it is not much extra work to double or even triple the audience that your video game has.

More Revenue

Relating to the last point, growing your audience is how you can make more money. Whether you are talking about video game sales or microtransactions, it is almost always better to have more people playing your game.

The only downside to a larger audience is that you have to have the proper workforce to handle the amount of volume that will be on your servers. It can get very bad fairly quickly if you can’t handle the traffic because that could lead to people giving negative reviews.

As long as you can handle the traffic, it is always better to have more of an audience because you can make more money. It really is all about volume when it comes to making money from sales and microtransactions in a game.

Better Than Making a New Title

My last point that supports video game porting is that you do not need to build a new title to reach more people. All that you are doing is taking a perfectly working and existing game and developing it for a new platform.

It is much more cost-effective to just port a game to a new platform instead of making a completely new title to reach more of an audience. When you build a new title, you do not know if it will be successful. On the other hand, if you have a great game then the hardpoint is already over. Even if you do not have the staff to port, there are great video game porting services out there.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• People are spending more time and money than ever on video games, obviously
• According to a new study, video games can actually be good for mental health
• Military vets are using video games to help manage their PTSD and the results seem promising
• The best video game livestreaming platforms, ranked

Chris Smith

Chris has been blogging since the early days of the internet. He primarily focuses on topics related to tech, business, marketing, and pretty much anything else that revolves around tech. When he's not writing, you can find him noodling around on a guitar or cooking up a mean storm for friends and family.