When did you work there? What you heard at EA applies to AAA console devs. If you're gambling everything on a blockbuster game with an enormous budget, it's tr

When did you work there? What you heard at EA applies to AAA console devs. If you're gambling everything on a blockbuster game with an enormous budget, it's true, I don't think it would be smart to make a PC exclusive today. That has everything to do with the crazy budget management, retail relationships, unsatisfiable consumer expectations, and unsustainable nature of the western AAAs, though. When a game like Bioshock Infinite can sell over six million copies and the developer still goes out of business, there is something deeply wrong with your business model. If you are an indie, it's totally different. You can do everything on a very small budget with a very small team, perhaps even by yourself. You can plan to break even in the thousands or tens of thousands of copies sold, not millions. You can target the long tail instead of making or breaking your company on the first week of sales. You can have a direct relationship with your fans. Piracy changes from a death sentence to free marketing. So for indies, PC is a clear win, because: It's where most of the people that like indie games are. The dev tools are free and available this second. You don't need to pay or sign an NDA and go through an approval process for dev kits, you don't need to pay for QA, you don't need to go through another QA process to push updates, you don't need a publisher. Just go and make your game. There is no single gatekeeper. You always have the option to pick another digital distribution store or sell the game yourself. Even if you plan to rely completely on Steam, this fact makes Valve much more lenient and easier to deal with than Sony or Microsoft. Most importantly, you can give people your game in a zip file. Free betas are awesome, especially for unproven developers. You get free word of mouth marketing, free playtesting, often great advice in early stages of development before it's "too late" to change things, and the peace of mind that people actually like your game and will buy it when you're finished. Do not underestimate the power of the free beta, it is easily the greatest benefit of the PC platform, and has singlehandedly made countless indie devs, even back before they called them that.