Joe Cobler said:
Couldn't get through the storm of rage and buttthurt to figure out if anyone took the pragmatic view. So I may be repeating someone.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see PC or something like it survive as a gaming platform, if only because of digital distribution having made it somewhat possible for an indy scene to be profitable, and because the tools of development are readily available and for the most part cheap or free (fuck Adobe, though).
That said, if I was management at a company that tries to make big games with fucktons of art assets and fancy engines that throw around shitloads of geometry and dynamically generated animations and blah blah blah, I'd probably be pushing for us to go console-only. Even if the rate of PC piracy was only slightly higher, or even lower than that on consoles. The development effort is more work for less reward. Either you spend way, way more time on development and testing, or you run the risk of, say, the video card vendor whose hardware you didn't test managing to make your team look like shitheads. Or users pissing and moaning that they spent thousands of dollars on a monstrous gaming rig and you didn't bother to actually render extra geometry just for them. If they don't try to suggest that you should have made something the majority of users would not be able to run at > 10 frames per second. On console you build towards and test on two, maybe three platforms (or as few as one!).
Yes, it was a dick move for Ubisoft to scream "pirates" on their way out the door. That was the wrong thing to say. But what could they possibly say that *wouldn't* piss off, like, the entire internet? Even quietly not developing for the platform anymore would piss you guys off.
Developing for PC from the get-go (or at least considering a port during development) would solve a bunch of problems, and it would probably be cheaper than porting after the fact. Even then, a company can out-source the PC-port, like Eidos did with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It doesn't take as much effort and investment to put out a decent PC version, if they're smart about it, at least.
Testing against various configurations is a problem since there's no catch-all solution for that, but it's not impossible. Maintaining a good relation with the video-card vendors (there's like 2 really big ones, so it isn't that hard) should help in that regard (give them an advance copy in time, so they can tweak their drivers, *hint*).
As for the whole "PC gamers demand MOAR GRAPHICS to max out their crazy expensive rigs" argument, that can also be remedied by making your graphics engine scalable, so it runs well on all sorts of rigs (like Valve's Source-engine). High-end users can turn up shadow-resolution, reflections, anti-aliasing and the like to get better image-quality, while low-end users can just turn down the options to get playable framerates. That's what PC-games have been doing for ages, and it's worked out well for the most part.
