There are two schools of thought when it comes to porting videogames between systems. On the one hand, you've got the supporters who believe that not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to purchase all available hardware, with ports giving them access to the most games. On the other, you've got the sceptics that believe it's not possible to get the most out of a game unless developers focus their efforts on a specific system.

The latter is perhaps why developer Kunos Simulazioni has faced such opposition to the console port of Assetto Corsa, a racing simulator so brilliant and so intrinsically tied to the platform it was developed on—it was launched on Steam Early access with much community input and mods—that many simply don't believe a console version will work. Since its launch in late 2014, Assetto Corsa has been widely lauded as the racing simulator, the game that petrol heads go to when the fluff of Forza's fancy weather effects grows stale and they fancy a real challenge.

It might not be as pretty as Drive Club, or sport the deep career mode of Gran Turismo, but Assetto Corsa has near everything else beat when it comes to replicating the simple pleasure of slamming a car round some tarmac. A racing wheel, by far a more popular peripheral on PC than console, is all but mandatory to get the best out of it.

Moving the game to console, then, is no easy task. Developer Kunos Simulazioni hopes to launch the game on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this year, moving its C++, C#, and DirectX 11 code across intact. Given the fact that this is the first time Kunos has ever worked on console, it—along with the game's many fans—has concerns about how successful it will be in turning a game designed around PC architecture and performance into something that could feasibly work on both the Xbox and PlayStation.

"Ultimately, we get two different kinds of reactions from people posting on the internet on forums and Facebook, etc" explained Kunos co-founder Marco Massarutto. "Some people say that we're not able to bring the same depth to the console that we have on the PC, that it's just not possible. The majority of people, though, say that they can't wait to see Assetto Corsa on console because the consoles need a proper [car] simulation. Really, we hope to surprise the sceptical people and change their minds, while pleasing the people who expect the console version to have the same depth as the PC edition."

Bringing Assetto Corsa to consoles wasn't the sole idea of Kunos. After seeing the game running on PC, Sony provided a PS4 dev kit in order for the team to experiment and see whether the game would even run. Once Kunos had spent some time working with the PS4, the decision was made to go all in on a fully featured console release.

"The first time we ran the PS4 version it ran at 15 frames per second, which was a bit shocking for us," Massarutto told us with a laugh. "We have a very good programmer, though, and we worked for a year to optimise everything and use every core of the PS4 and Xbox One in order to get the kind of performance we're seeing today.

"We're used to creating simulation software specifically for the PC, and we've been doing that since 2005. However, the PS4 and Xbox One are much closer to PC architecture than the previous consoles were... especially the PS3. Still, the hardware is pretty different…at the start we didn't believe we could achieve 60 frames per second, we thought we would have to stick at 30 frames."

"It was a big challenge for us," continued Massarutto, "because the game wasn't designed to run on console and so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to work within the consoles' memory, graphics and general performance capabilities to bring out the simulation we've made. On console you must fight with the limitations of a fixed hardware. The good thing about fixed hardware is that you know exactly what you've got to work with in terms of resources. In the end, we did it, though."