Many of the AAA games are being developed in parallel on the console and on the PC. Skyrim, RAGE did it that way.
Then you think about Valve. Except for Portal 2, they’re all PC games and last I checked, they’re memorable. Who can’t wait for Half Life 3? Everyone. Ok, mostly everyone.
Besides, nobody can argue graphic equality PC vs Console. If you think they’re equal either you have bad sight or your gaming computer is crappy. 
In some instance I’ll agree with your statement, but for real game studios, it’s not the case.
Turn based strategy as well as RTS - and hybrids like Shogun.
It’s true that a lot of the non-strategy genres have moved over to consoles though. I guess market size and single defined platform have their appeal for developers…
@zarch said:I guess market size and single defined platform have their appeal for developers...
There's also the ease of access bit. Building a gaming PC is pricey and time consuming.. especially when compared to running to Best Buy or Future Shop (I tried to be all-inclusive, don't know which electronics stores are big in Europe :)) and coming home happy.. for the price of the card we're talking about here, you can buy 2 xbox's and a few games.
Double bonus: You don't need to keep a Windows partition on your hard drive!
@sbook said:
Double bonus: You don't need to keep a Windows partition on your hard drive!
You can only blame yourself for choosing the wrong OS to begin with. :P
As for the consoles, they have one good thing for them. Their hardware never change. They don't suddenly become faster. They don't grow new hardware every six months. Hence the development cost is lower.
Thats the exact problem: With a PC its your fault when the game doesn’t run, on Console its “their” fault. I like the latter much better, don’t have time to waste with configuring PC’s, especially when its for recreational / gaming purposes… The occasional download / update is annoying enough, if I had to then run an installer and whatnot, idk if I’d invest that time just for a game. And really, 4x the resolution and thicker smoke doesn’t make a better game…
The good thing about the hardware not changing is that developers really have a reason to get into and everything out of the hardware, maybe even inventing techniques on the way that improve performance for PC’s too. Just look at Uncharted, its really pretty. Once again its not about raw numbers but about the amount of attention and detail that has been paid during development.
With IKEA, everybody looks down on self-assembly stuff and obviously sees the point in having a real craftsman doing good furniture, for computers it seems to be normal to just get a bunch of standard-cut planks and then be left alone… Oh well
I like the console for all of the reasons you state… it “just works”. The magic is still there… plug the disc in and play. Of course, the down side is that you wait and wait and wait for things to improve and hope [insert favorite console] here decides to come out with new hardware.
I like the PC for all of the reasons others state… I can upgrade my own hardware. I can try out different things that fit my workflow better. Though there is a little “Cross your fingers and pray” when installing a new game but most of the time it works out. And in the mean time, I get a boost on everything else when I upgrade one of my components.
I think Macs fall somewhere in between. More frequent hardware refreshes. Slightly less specific hardware to support (From a dev’s perspective there are more Mac configs than there are PS3 configs). But stable enough to get some stable hardware targets.
I am like the Jedi where my PC is concerned, I like to make my own lightsaber for getting down to serious business. For games, lately I prefer to buy an off the shelf lightsaber (PS3 in this case). I know when I fire it up it will work and my free time is very scarce. On the PC I know there were a few RPGs that just installing it and getting it up and running took all the “play time” I had that day. Though to be fair, console games come close to that sometimes. (I’m looking at you Metal Gear Solid 4! Though you were totally worth it.)