Durante Co-Founds PC Porting Studio

Published: January 26, 2019 4:06 PM /

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ph3 games

Today, Durante (Peter Thoman) has announced that he is getting into the porting business for good, starting PH3 Games, an offshoot of the main PH3 studio. While PH3 Games is devoted to porting and consulting for titles on the PC platform, the main studio focuses on technology consulting, teaching software engineering, and software development.

Originally, Durante surfaced in August 2012 with his DSFix, a fix that essentially made Dark Souls playable, as its initial release was in a very poor state. In recent years, he has done some ports for some xSeed titles such as Little King's Story and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel I and II. This led to Durante's decision in September 2018, when he formed PH3 with two other co-founders who also had PhD's. Since there are there are three employees, the company is called PH3.

The blurb on PH3's website states that they specialize in the "engineering" aspects of game development and that they are available for ports and consulting on performance issues such as "optimization, parallelization, refactoring, and tuning".

They also have blurbs many notable individuals, with a particularly glowing one from Xseed Executive Vice President Ken Berry:

I first reached out to Peter to help with a difficult project due to his sterling reputation as a hobbyist programmer, but I was quickly impressed by his professionalism and responsiveness. On two separate occasions where the originally contracted team had essentially stated it was impossible to increase the performance any further, Peter was able to optimize the titles significantly with barely any support or additional tools. Our confidence in his abilities grew even more once we gave him a full project from start to finish, which he delivered on schedule with quality that exceeded our already high expectations of his work. I cannot recommend Peter highly enough for anyone wanting the best running PC game possible.
In February 2017, Durante noted after the optimization process of Little King's Story that he was interested at "what the market is like for port consulting, improvements, and/or from-the-ground-up ports of niche- to mid-end games." It looks like there is a market, as Durante has already stated that the studio is "already working on stuff."


Quick Take

This is excellent news. Durante has earned his reputation as someone who can take a game and bring it up to scratch relatively quickly. Now that he works with a studio and is more 'official', I expect to see a lot more ports coming from PH3, which is something that the PC community is very appreciative of. It wasn't too long ago that a good PC port was a happy surprise rather than an expected result, so for Durante co-found a studio is great. Best of luck to them.

What do you think of this news? Are there any ports that you would like Durante to tackle? Let us know in the comments!

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| Staff Writer

Patrick is a former Staff Writer for TechRaptor and has been gaming on every console he could get since he could hold a controller. He’s been writing for… More about Patrick