I know this isn’t going to be popular among PC gamers but honestly the PC market just looks like a massive waste of time to me unless we are talking about a port that is made afterward as an afterthought rather than being the primary focus.
Why? Because no matter how much PC gamers deny it the PC is just horrible to develop for from a profit perspective. Right of the bat, a good portion of your players won’t even buy your game but will pirate it. How many actually do so and how much potential profit is lost is highly debatable, but point is that THERE ARE lost profits regardless of the specifics and all the people claiming otherwise are delusional or just pirates themselves.
Then there are all the crazy steam sales…
Steam has created this horrible mentality that there is no reason to buy a game on the PC unless it’s already on a 70%+ discount. This may seem cool from the customers point of view, but for the devs it’s utterly horrible and drives down profits. On the consoles and other platforms extreme sales like this won’t happen as often.
So yea, I can’t help but feel that making games as a PC exclusive or even just PC centered is a waste of time if you want to make any money. Not that there is anything wrong with making a PC port maybe later after the fact for some extra cash if you want to do so, but otherwise…why bother?
Yes there are always exceptions to the rule like Minecraft, but they are also just that…exceptions to the rule.
Yes there is a lot of piracy.
Yes there are hidden costs involved in testing or support.
The thing is the consoles aren’t immune to any of this, it’s just less obvious. Many consoles have rampant piracy already. There’s a lot of extra testing you have to go through to pass platform requirements (often known as TCRs or TRCs), and if you need to patch the game for any reason it can be a huge ordeal. The platforms specific dev costs are potentially much higher, as you need to register to be a dev, and pay for special dev hardware. And the revenue split is generally worse than the PC.
Big AAA games sell hundreds of thousands to millions of copies on console, and 10~20% of those numbers on PC.
Huge break out Indie games sell up to the low millions.
Everyone else is happy to get >50k in sales, total, across multiple platforms. I’m sure there are thousands of indie games that come out that don’t even see past hundreds of sales. I’ve certainly worked on some that have lifetime sales numbers of less than 100 copies sold.
However you can make a game and ship it on the PC essentially for free*, ignoring the actual development time, and assuming you already have a PC. A game that’s going to sell <50k copies are probably going to see very similar sales numbers on PC, or potentially even more on PC than console for some games.
Console development is not accessible for lowly peons like you and I. The only way that the big companies will let you get in Console development is if you already have a game that is guaranteed to sell well on any platform, console or not.
PC gaming is a massive market. Companies are currently making record amounts of money selling games for PC. The challenge for indie developers is that there are so many games released every day for PC that nobody could ever find time to play them all. So that massive record amount of profit mostly goes to a short list of major titles.
On console, there are fewer games to compete against for attention, but it is harder to get games on console. The reason there are fewer games on consoles is because those platform owners don’t allow much on them. Companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo strongly prefer working with larger companies that can generate millions of sales instead of tiny indies with tiny sales.
The easiest way to convince the console platform owners to let your indie title appear on their consoles is to already have huge sales on PC.
You will develop 98% of the entire game on PC so the question can safely be left to later for most devices, you should see how far you get before grand plans ™.
As someone who used to be mostly a PC gamer, now I own 200 + XB1 games, PS4 maybe 10 games, PC I BOUGHT one game in the last few years… and I develop for console a lot, and some PC, it is PC, there are a lot of PC gamers but they are also a ton of console gamers, but they are spread out. between consoles. So, I always tell people its wise to start with PC, and also consider releasing console as there is a big market for selling games there also, which is why more popular STEAM games are…
what? there are the same games, as PC, and Steam and other sources… so not sure what your talking about here, that console has a hard time getting games on it… … when is the last time you had one? Sorry but that is not true at all. Now, there are more PC games, but console, there are almost as many TODAY… but they are spread out, between consoles… We can almost buy the same games, for PC that we can on console… all of the popular ones, many Steam ones and much more…
Yes people who spend $1,000+ on their gaming hardware will not buy any games unless they are discounted to $5. No profits to be had from these cheapskates!
I believe the biggest thing that should be mentioned here: marketing.
Developers in general never really see the light of day in terms customers purchasing.
The platform doesn’t really matter either.
Yeah some platforms will automatically result in more sales simply because the stringent requirements to even get on the platform equals less competition.
But with that being said, if a dev had the money for marketing and actually made a ‘gem’ of a game, it would sell far more on computer than any other platform in existence at this time.
The reason marketing is the most important part? Because the ease of use to get your game on PC is very simple, which results in a flooded market and pushes games down and never noticed.
But it’s a gamble either way, just because a platform is harder to get onto doesn’t necessarily equate to more sales because the audience of said platform may be entirely different than what you should release onto.
And aside, as one above said, 98% of your game is developed on computer, what’s the pain in releasing it on computer and other platforms? Doesn’t really cost much of anything to release on computer - at least in terms of how much consoles will charge.
If you look at the total number of games on Steam (~20k) and the total number of games on, say, PS4’s store (~3k), it’s pretty clearly true. You’re right that there’s a huge overlap if you mostly look at popular and/or big-name stuff, but if you look at all games then definitely consoles are far more exclusive than PC.
It’s also region-specific, as there are countries where consoles hardly exist and it’s mostly PC gaming (e.g. China, which is known to have a person or two living there). Then there’s Japan, which is almost console-only.
