Porting République to PC - how is the industry calling?

We wondered if the appearance of an initially mobile project on PC would be an important event for the mobile games industry?

“This is the hour of Unity 5 recognition,” David Helgason, the founder of Unity, wrote yesterday about a large publication by Polygon dedicated to the imminent release of the PC version of République.

The fact is that the authors of the project – the studio Camouflage – significantly redesigned the project: they moved it to a new version of the engine, redrawn textures, redesigned lighting and UI.

After the remastering, the project began to play with new colors. Graphically, as far as can be judged from recent screenshots, République has become quite consistent with current gaming standards.

On the left is the mobile version République, on the right – for PC
But, of course, we would like to draw your attention to something else.

If today it is considered standard practice to port games from PC/consoles to mobile platforms, as well as initially parallel development of one project for the maximum number of content ecosystems, then the Camouflage step may well be a call for those who have already released their project for mobile, but have not decided to port it.

Of course, République is far from the first case when a game originally created with an eye on mobile devices is ported to a PC. There was, for example, Lili: Child of Geos, created on Unreal. But the children’s project about a girl who got to the island of wooden robots was missed by many, as well as the excellent isometric shooter Meltdown, and chamber Room and Year Walk.

On the left is the mobile version of Lili, on the right for PC
But the development of Camouflage is a completely different matter: an innovative game in terms of gameplay about the fight against the “Big Brother”, which raised more than half a million dollars on Kickstarter, has been the focus of attention of players and the profile press since the announcement.

Additional excitement was created by the name of the person who headed the project. Ryan Payton, the founder of the studio, has worked on projects such as Metal Gear 3 and 4, as well as Halo 4.

In other words, the release of République under the new OS is a more noticeable phenomenon within the industry, more capable of creating a trend.

On the other hand, even in the event of its occurrence, will there be many projects on the mobile platform that it makes sense to transfer? For example, does it make sense to play Subway Surfers, Dungeon Hunter or Infinity Blade on other platforms?

What do you think?

The remaster of République on PC/Mac will be released on February 26.