I was hoping someone could explain this to me as it makes no sense what so ever.  It is cheaper and faster to make a game on the PC, even though PC games have better graphics than consoles, need to work on a wider range on computers with a lot of different parts inside, and need to scale to run well on computers that don't meet recommended spec.  While consoles, for some reason, take longer to make games, are more expensive to make games, but they don't need to scale and you have relatively set hardware (ps3/360 have some different hardware but nothing like PCs do).  So why is it easier and cheaper to make games on PC?  You seem to have to do more with unset hardware verses consoles.  Does anyone know or is this another mystery of gaming?

You pay no royalties for PC software unlike console games.
You don't have any TRC's to deal with, much.
Tools and engines are easy to come by and cheap.
Coders and artists are incredibly familiar with the coding environment.
PC's are much more powerful in raw terms.
Less Q&A.
Less marketing required.
Less retail and distribution required.

And more.

Digital distribution especially drops the cost of shipping a game.

Wow, so is this thread over already?

People say the advantages of consoles - Optimise it to take greater advantage of the hardware and use artistical tricks like deferred rendering and filtering, these take time and cost money. So it is actually a pro and a con.

The engines are easier to make, you have processors that use out of order execution which means the processor optimises your code on the fly. For consoles you have to code much more precisely.

There are many more people who can code for a computer than consoles. So you get economies of scale, you don't have people that have to be trained specifically for coding on the PC.

All programmers work on powerful intel computers, if they are just working on a PC game they can compile and test, whereas there are a few more steps if it is a console game.

You don't have to code to a standard for graphics as much as console games. It is perfectly acceptable to release games with average visuals like in strategy or adventure games.

How about those reasons?

lol, I read Viper1's response and was like "OK, well, that's that, then."

Sorry, I'll wait a few posts next time, hehe.

so pretty much easier to work with because of familiarity, even though with all the different hardware it will have to run on, the fact that it is on PC speeds things up and makes it cheaper? Since a big part of budget is paying a big staff a lot of money a year and all. Also I guess it is easier to patch problems with a PC so they can release a game without having to have all the polish that consoles games used to require (less so now of course with ps3 and 360). I guess I thought the problems of having to scale the graphics to run on less than recommended computers and having to test it on a bunch of different hardware would have made it more difficult to program for.

PC programming is much easier because it's an open system that has been on the market for over 2 dozen years while consoles are closed systems with their own proprietary functions and coding tricks that typically only around for 6 or so years on average.

The scaling isn't tough since everything runs in relatively the same environment. With consoles you have a very specific CPU, GPU, etc...

Basically things can be more generalized on a PC were as with a console you have to be very specific.

Not to forget the other things I mentioned above.

Since when has the system of choice ever been up to the developer? The consumer decides the direction the market goes. Wherever demand is greatest, to be exact. And when you look at the usual intentionally-misinterpreted statistics the right way, you realize pretty quickly that the PC is not it and has not been it since about 1988.