It recently occurred to me that we have just passed the third anniversary of the XBox 360, and at a similar point in the life of the XBox games like Half-Life 2 and Far Cry were released. Even though the XBox was discontinued for other reasons, a year later the XBox wouldn’t have received too many of the PC ports that dominated its library because PC developers were doing things above and beyond what was possible on the XBox.

Now, PC developers are not as quick to bump up the minimum requirements of games as they once were but we’re approaching a time when they will begin to ignore the HD consoles. Certainly, they may still want a console port to maximize profit but they can (potentially) wait until the next generation begins before they produce a console version. What will happen to the HD consoles when PC developers decided to focus their minimum requirements far above what the HD consoles are capable of?

why would they move on. There is money to make on the consoles. And production costs will only go up and may not be able to be recovered on pc alone

Being that most of the graphical techiques used in making 3D animated movies are already being employed on PC and HD console games, I'm not too sure that the production costs of games are going to see that dramatic of an increase.

Beyond that, why developers would want to move on is because the PC market is unique in that gamers have unusually high expectations of developers taking advantage of new technology; and they're willing to upgrade their system on a regular basis to play games that push the limits. On top of this, a lot of developers (Epic, Valve, id, Crytech) make a large portion of their money by licencing their game engines to other companies; and these engines develop their reputation by taking advantage of the latest and greatest technology.

Finally, there is money to be made on consoles but we're approaching a time when new consoles are not that far away and the developers will have the choice to target next generation consoles.