Economics of porting (RE: graphics power etc. )*spin-off*

[Goodtwin]

Frostbite was ported to mobile three years ago. There is no engine/hardware capabilities issue.

It's just that Frostbite 3 engine is already running on PS360, so it should not be too hard in general to make the engine run on Switch. Perhaps the Switch port was just so low priority at the time it was decided that even that little extra work was not seen as a worthy thing to do. It's also possible that Frostbite wouldn't really offer all that much for the Switch version.

I think your dead on with both points. When EA committed to bringing Fifa to Switch I am sure they were still very skeptical that it would be a break out success coming off the poor selling Wii U where they felt really burnt. Your second point is most like very true as well. Just because its a newer engine doesnt mean its more efficient. If all the newer features are pretty taxing, it wont be a good fit for Switch.

 

[milk]

Frostbite was ported to mobile three years ago. There is no engine/hardware capabilities issue.

The frostbite that's running on ps4 and one is certainly very different from the one that ran on ps360 years ago. Fifa was just recently ported to frostbite, and had the modern interation of it in mind. The frostbite that runs on mobile is probably even different from these two. Lot of work was put on gpu driven rendering, gpu compute, pbr etc, which are features that rely heavily on modern gpu features that are not present on ps360 and hence never accounted for on their version of the engine. Mobile, like switch, is in an interesting position in that it has performance roughly similar to that of ps360 but a more modern architecture and featureser. As such, most modern frostbite features can, trchnically, be ported to them. How they would perform though, is another story. My bet is that mobile frostbite is very bare bones and stripped down version of the engine, not because you couldn't possibly refactor most features of the next gen version of the engine to mobile, but because the large amount of time required to do so hasn't manifested itself as economically justifiable yet, and might never do.
I would not be surprised if even some of the file formats for assets and other data are incompatible across the old-time last gen frostbite and the ps4one version, and regardless, that is most certainly the case actoss old-time fifa engine for ps360 and frostbite for current gen.
So EA has a current gen version of the engine already up and running with all its compatible assets and code factored with xbox one and up in mind, and also the old fifa engine -not frostbite- for ps360 lazily updated by their second tier team, with it's own asset formats and coding conventions.
If they were to use their mobile version of frostbite on switch, that would either require them to refactor the assets from the xbox one version to the level of performance switch can handle, or convert the ones from the ps360 engine to mobile frostbite. All while they still work with the old engine for the last gen release of the game. Not worth it.
Or they could also port fifa on ps360 from the last gen fifa engine to the last gen frostbite engine, and make it run at 720p60 on those platforms, and then switch gets that. That second senario is so absurdly more not worth it than the alteady unlikely first one I even gave a little chuckle.