The difficulties of porting?

Hello!
I'm not quite sure were I should put this, but if this is the totally wrong place please tell me so that I can move it.

I'm working on a game and it's getting to the point where we are talking to Publishers and such, some of them offer to take up the porting so that we can focus on the PC build. But I'm wondering: how much work is there to actually port a Unity game?
I take for granted that it isn't as easy as to change the target platform and build, but from my naive and young viewpoint it doesn't seem all to difficult to do.
I'm not talking about getting dev'kits and SDK's and such, just the "getting it to run on this machine" part of porting.

[TL;DR]
Is there anyone here with porting experience in Unity, primaraly from PC to PS3/4 or Xbox One/360?
If I have all the dev'kits and licenses, how much accual "work" is there to get it to work on the consoles?

Also what are some potholes that you can avoid when making your PC build to ease the porting process?
And general sharing of experience with Unity porting would be much appreciated (console, phone or microwave for that matter).

Thanks!

 

I would counter a bit and say that learning how to port a game, especially how to make it rock solid on a limited system like a console can be a super valuable experience. If it means you have to recoup less money from your publisher, then so much the better.

If you're porting to PS4/Xbox One, then it's probably pretty straightforward performance wise, as those systems have very PC like architectures and lots of RAM. At least, as long as your game doesn't require a high end PC with like 4 GB of RAM.

If you're porting to PS3/Xbox 360, it's quite a bit more work, especially the PS3. The PS3 especially is a real bear, but both systems are quite a bit less powerful and ideosyncratic than modern PCs.

Graham's point C is also really, really important. TCR compliance can take a ton of time, and is basically different for every platform you ship on, even Xbox 360 vs Xbox One or PS3 vs PS4. It also takes a lot of QA time, including time from people who have gone through the submission process before. Often the publisher has people like this on site, so you could consider doing some ports in house and but using your publisher's QA.

 

The thing about "If you've never made a console game before, just let the publisher take care of it for you." is that then you never get that experience you need. And then I'm just stuck in a world of making only PC games, which feels like a huge handicap.

The positive side of doing the porting ourselfs is that we don't need to wait for the publisher to do allot of work post our production time. Instead, when we are done the game is ready for release.

Thanks both of you for your insights!
You've given me some things to think about, using the publishers QA for the TCR sounds like a smart thing to do.

 

Sounds like a good plan. Just don't do the PS3 port yourself (if there is one). Unless your game has very modest system requirements, a PS3 port is the kind of experience you can live without.