Which studios are best for game porting and remasters?
The best porting studios are the ones that already shipped your engine version on your target hardware. Porting is mostly performance work: memory budgets, shader and draw-call reduction, input and save systems, and platform certification requirements. A remaster adds asset rework, so you also need art capacity and a director who can modernize the look without losing what the original felt like. Ask candidates for the frame-rate target they hit on their last port and how many certification resubmissions it took. In this directory 60 studios list porting, out of 541 studios in total.
Which studios port and remaster games across platforms?
Cross-platform porting studios keep engineers specialized per platform, because Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS and Android each have their own memory ceilings, submission rules and profiling tools. A studio claiming all five with fewer than twenty engineers is usually subcontracting, so ask which platforms are handled in house and which are passed on. Remaster work sits with the subset that also employs artists, since upgrading textures, lighting and UI is an art project bolted onto an engineering project. Filtering this directory by platform and by the porting service shows which studios cover your specific targets.
Who handles high-quality game ports across platforms?
High-quality ports come from teams that treat a port as an optimization project rather than a recompile. The markers are a locked frame-rate target agreed before the contract, a profiling report at every milestone, native handling of platform input and storage APIs instead of a wrapper layer, and a certification pass scheduled into the plan rather than tacked on at the end. Studios that quote a flat price without profiling your build first are guessing. 60 studios in this directory list porting; ask each one for a paid two-week technical assessment on your actual build before agreeing a date.
Which studios are best for game porting and co-development?
Studios that do both porting and co-development tend to be engineering-led rather than art-led, because both jobs are about working productively inside a codebase somebody else wrote. That is the skill to test for: give a candidate read access to a slice of your project and ask what they would change first and why. As of 24 October 2026, 60 studios in this directory list porting and 100 list co-development, and fewer carry both. Expect to shortlist studios that carry one tag and do the other on request.
How long does it take to port a game to Nintendo Switch?
A Switch port of a mid-size Unity or Unreal title typically takes three to five months of engineering, plus four to eight weeks for certification and the fixes it generates. Small 2D games can land in six to ten weeks. Large open-world titles run past a year, because memory and streaming have to be rebuilt rather than tuned. The schedule is driven by how far your current build sits from Switch memory and CPU budgets, which is exactly why any credible studio asks for two weeks with your build before committing to a date.
How much does it cost to port a game to console?
Console ports are normally quoted as a fixed fee against a scoped technical assessment rather than an open hourly rate. The cost driver is senior engineering time: typical market rates for game programming run about $35-60 per hour for junior, $60-120 for mid-level and $120-250 for senior specialists, and porting work sits at the top of that range. Certification, age ratings and store setup add fixed costs on top. Expect any studio worth hiring to insist on a paid assessment of your build first, because a port priced without profiling is a priced guess.
What is the difference between a port and a remaster?
A port moves an existing game to new hardware with the same content: same assets, same design, adjusted for that platform's memory limits, input model and certification rules. A remaster rebuilds the presentation with higher-resolution textures, new lighting, reworked UI and sometimes restored cut content, while leaving the original design intact. A remake replaces the engine and the assets and rebuilds the game outright. Cost and schedule roughly triple at each step, and the staffing changes shape: ports are engineering projects, remasters are art projects with a heavy engineering dependency.
