How much does it cost to port a game to console?

Getting a game you already shipped onto a console costs little in fees and a lot in work. Of 921 indie Steam games whose first console version came out after their Steam launch, 471 (51%) got there through a company that isn’t credited on Steam, usually one that paid for the port in exchange for a share of console sales.

This is for a developer whose game is on Steam and who keeps hearing “you should put it on Switch.” Below is every cost the platforms and tools publish, what porting studios say they charge, and how the games before yours actually paid.

We make games too. The console version is the line that sits on the to-do list for years because nobody can tell you what it costs. So we collected every public number we could find and set it beside the store data we gathered for our Switch, Xbox and PlayStation studies.

The fixed costs fit on one page, and most are zero

Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony don’t charge you to apply. Nintendo’s portal says “registering for the portal and downloading the tools is completely free.” Microsoft says registering as an Xbox partner and applying to ID@Xbox is free.

Digital age ratings come through IARC, which all three console stores use, and IARC says ratings are “free of cost to developers at this time.”

The fees are in hardware and engines. Here is what was public on October 15, 2026.

Cost	What is public
Nintendo registration	Free
Xbox registration and ID@Xbox	Free
PlayStation dev kit	Sony announced in 2022 a free loan of one development kit and one test kit to accepted indie partners, returned within two years
Nintendo dev kit	Not public. Nintendo says the hardware cost is explained “inside the portal”
Xbox dev kit	Not public. The Verge reported in October 2025 a rise from $1,500 to $2,000
Age rating (digital)	Free through IARC
Unity	Console build modules need Unity Pro: $2,310 per seat per year
Unreal	Console support at no extra cost once the platform’s NDA is in place; the usual 5% royalty on lifetime gross above $1 million
GameMaker	Console export needs the Enterprise subscription
Godot	No official console export. W4 Games licenses one: $800 per platform per year, or $2,000 for all, under $300,000 revenue
Store cut	Microsoft’s agreement takes 30% of net receipts on Xbox console games. Sony and Nintendo don’t publish theirs

On the store cut: the clearest public record for Sony and Nintendo is a 2021 US court ruling, which found Epic paid 30% on Fortnite transactions through the Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo stores. Treat 30% as the working assumption until you see your own agreement.

Add it up for a solo Unity developer going to all three consoles and the fixed costs come to a few thousand dollars a year. That is real money. It is not why games stay off consoles.

The port is the price, and published quotes run 20 to 1

Porting studios that publish numbers give very different ones.

• PolyCrunch Games, a small porting studio, says a port “can vary between 5000USD and 9000USD” per platform, paid in stages, with patches from $450.
• Mike Rose of No More Robots, in a 2021 talk reported by Game World Observer, put ports at “anything from $10,000 to $100,000.”
• Dreamloop Games wrote in 2022 that a straightforward single-platform port runs “mid-to-upper five figures.”

These don’t contradict each other. They price different games.

A small 2D game in an engine with console support, a clean codebase and no online features sits at the bottom. A 3D game with heavy memory use, online play or custom engine code climbs toward the top. Sickhead Games, which ports for a fixed fee, says it quotes only after reading your code, then sets “a firm fixed price.”

Time is the other cost. Sickhead says most ports take four to six months. Klabater says three to nine. Sometimes You, one of the porting publishers below, says three to four months from signing to passing platform testing.

Half the late ports were paid for with a share, not cash

Here is where the store data comes in. We took the 5,860 paid indie games that launched on Steam from 2020 to 2022 with at least 10 Steam-purchase reviews in their first year, and matched them against the full US Switch, Xbox and PlayStation stores.

1,527 of them (26%) are on at least one of the three. For 921, the first console version arrived after the Steam launch, a median 14 months after.

For 471 of those 921 (51%), the company that put out that first console version is not credited on Steam. For self-published games, it was 336 of 563 (60%). The smaller the Steam game, the likelier the porter was someone new.

1. 10 to 99 reviews (369 games)65.3%
2. 100 to 299 (80)53.8%
3. 300 to 999 (54)55.6%
4. 1,000 or more (60)36.7%

Paid indie games launched on Steam 2020 to 2022, self-published on Steam, with 10+ Steam-purchase reviews in year one, whose first Switch, Xbox or PlayStation version came out after their Steam launch month. Store reads: Switch September 29, Xbox October 12, PlayStation October 14, 2026.

Source: Strike Two analysis of Steam, Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation store data

That company is usually a porting publisher. It does the work, holds the dev kits and the platform agreements, and takes a share of console revenue instead of an invoice.

The busiest on our list were eastasiasoft and Ratalaika Games (34 games each), QUByte Interactive (32), Ultimate Games (31), REDDEER.GAMES (24), Silesia Games (19) and Sometimes You (16). 186 different companies did at least one.

The terms are mostly private, but some are on the record. Klabater says it charges “nothing upfront” and recoups its costs from its own share.

PolyCrunch offers a revenue share of 10% to 30%, split 50/50 until the port cost is recouped. Voyer Law’s 2026 contract report found developers kept an average 66% of revenue in console-only deals, which we covered in what publishers take.

One port usually means every console

A port is bought once and shipped widely. Of the 536 games whose first console came after Steam and that reached two or more, 56% released on all of them in the same month, and 82% carry the same publisher on every console.

Porting publishers push this furthest. Games whose first late port came through a new company reached all three consoles 46% of the time, against 28% for games ported by their developer or their existing Steam publisher.

1. A company not credited on Steam (471 games)45.6%
2. The developer or its Steam publisher (450)28.4%

Games from the same population whose first Switch, Xbox or PlayStation version came out after their Steam launch month. All three means a full game on the US Switch, Xbox and PlayStation stores.

Source: Strike Two analysis of Steam, Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation store data

So when you compare a quote per platform with a revenue share, compare it against three consoles, not one. A $7,000 quote is $21,000 for three. A share covers all of them, plus the patches, for the life of the deal.

When a console port is the wrong move

The game has had its moment. GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless wrote that even developers with a decent PC hit usually report they “made back our porting costs,” plus some bonus money. Our PlayStation study found that big Steam games ported over a year late drew a fraction of the console ratings of those ported at launch.

You’d pay cash you can’t lose. A fixed-fee port is a bet that console sales will beat the quote. Nobody publishes console sales per game, so nobody can promise you that.

The game is built for mouse and keyboard. Then it isn’t a port, it’s a redesign. Try it on a controller first. The fixes that earn Steam Deck Verified are most of what a console asks for.

A share would cost more than the work. If you can port it yourself and have the months, keeping the full share is worth a lot. 450 of the 921 late-ported games did it without a new company.

What to do next

1. Register with Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation. It’s free and it’s the only way to see real terms.
2. Check your engine’s console route and price before anything else.
3. Play the game start to finish on a controller, with text readable from a couch.
4. Get two kinds of offer: a fixed quote for all three consoles, and a revenue share. Compare them over the years you expect the game to sell.
5. Before signing with a porting publisher, look up their console releases. Every store shows the publisher.

If you’d rather someone else carry consoles entirely, that is part of what a publisher does after launch, and it works for games already out, as in finding a publisher for a released game.

How we measured it

• Games. Every paid indie game (Steam’s Indie tag) that launched on Steam from January 2020 to December 2022 with at least 10 Steam-purchase reviews in its first 12 months: 5,860 games. A game sold in Early Access first is dated from its first review month.
• Console records. Our earlier matches against the full US Nintendo eShop (read September 29, 2026), Xbox store (October 12) and PlayStation Store (October 14). Each counts a full game with a release date and a title and publisher matching the Steam record. The methods and checks are in those posts.
• First console after Steam. The earliest release month across the three stores is after the Steam launch month. 1,526 of the 1,527 console games had a date; one Xbox listing did not.
• New company. The publisher on that first console release matches none of the game’s Steam developer or publisher credits. Where two consoles tie for first, either counts. Self-published means every Steam publisher credit names the developer.
• Same publisher on every console. Publisher names match after removing company words and punctuation, or when one contains the other.
• Costs. Read from each platform’s, engine’s and studio’s own pages on October 15, 2026, except where a source is dated.
• Limits. US stores only, and each was read on a different day. A “new company” can be the developer’s own label under another name. Removed games are missed, so the console counts are floors. We can’t see console sales, so nothing here says a port paid off.