Hey,
i bet you guys all know this problem. You release a high budget title that also gets high ratings. Ofcourse, you want to expand to other platforms. But then… the reviewers deem the game to representive and give it low ratings, even reducing your amount of fans.
I think you should have the abillity to port your games to a different platform, but the quallity will ofcourse be slightly less than the original version.
(sorry for my bad English, i’m Dutch)
Good idea, you should also get the option of a good port and a crap port, the crap port would save you money when your game is REALLY good 
I just make a sequel for the new console in that case. It builds up on the hype of the original title, and generally does well.
In the early game, you do not have that option.
Sure, but that’s pretty realistic. You’re not going to be spending time on ports of your games until fairly late in your development years. Especially 30 years ago, when the console wars were massive, and developers chose a side in each of the wars to support.
Edit: Same goes for sequels. You’re not likely to make sequels until later on in your development life since franchises as a whole are something a bigger developer would do. Small developers generally don’t have the traction to make sequels, especially back then in the 30-year past.
Sorry, i accidently mis-hit the reply button…
I replied in my original post but here it is again:
Same goes for sequels. You’re not likely to make sequels until later on in your development life since franchises as a whole are something a bigger developer would do. Small developers generally don’t have the traction to make sequels, especially back then in the 30-year past.
When i discover a hit formula, i usually make “duplicates” with the same name, except an added number. I use sequels in the beginning game, so it would be nice if it became accessible early in-game.
I definitely think this would be a cool addition. I think a slider similar to the hiring budget slider would work great. Dictate how much to invest in the port process, as a percentage of the cost of the original development of the game. How much you invest in the port determines how well it does. Of course make it so you have to research this ability first.
you can make sequels? I guess that makes the post I just made useless lol
Already closed it and recommended an alternative thread to talk about sequels. I’m pretty fast. 
Well one way to add this feature (since it indeed is a hot item in real life Developing/Publishing) is when at the start of a new game dev. you can choose which platform will be your main target, and then be able to choose alternate platforms which will cost a fraction of the dev costs (the porting costs so to speak).
Example (im only in yr 12 yet, so i use random platform names i encountered so far):
Main platform: PC (costs 150K)
Alternate platform: Tes64 (costs 25 or 50K)
Alternate platform: Vesa (costs 25 or 50K)
Now i have the option of going for just the PC, which will cost me 150K or take 1 or both alternate platforms as well, thereby increasing the costs to 250K max, but increasing the sales due to a wider audiance.
Porting shouldnt be cheap though, since it will require time and thus money to change the game code/engine with support of the different OS’s and controllers used on the different platforms.
Early computer gaming was full of multi-platform releases, especially for arcade conversions. Also plenty of franchises as well - anyone else remember Dizzy?
This could be built into the game engine. Research the different platforms then build a new engine that can export to all of them side by side, for a cost.