The fact that developers have to cater to multiple platforms that have hardware limitations and different operating systems has led to worse quality of games of time. Console exclusives are anti-competitive, monopolistic, and they lead to a terrible consumer experience.
Most developers counter that they do console exclusives because there’s too much piracy on the PC gaming market.
No idea if that’s true, or if it even matters.
Personally I think the quality of games has suffered mostly through pressure from investors (and fans) to release them as early as possible, and focus is now overwhelmingly on multiplayer online experiences rather than carefully curated level and mission design.
Nah, it’s not been about piracy for a while, and even when it was about piracy it wasn’t just about piracy. PC development is inherently harder because there isn’s a locked hardware target, so compatibility is difficult and expensive to service. And for a long time, PC sales were just much, much lower than console sales.
Both of those things have changed for a while, partially through the reduction of options in the PC market, partially through PC hardware manufacturers increasingly doing the job of servicing big games with dedicated drivers and partially through Valve becoming a closed, DRM-enabled platform more comparable to a console. You can chart that process, and it’s long, difficult and full of ambiguity.
I have lots of thoughts on “game quality” as well, but it’s hard to know what people even mean with that sometimes (bugs? design? content?). In general games today are… kinda great. Last year in particular was mind blowing. That said, games can get huge, expensive and complicated now in ways they couldn’t really a few decades ago. But it’s also true that games are more varied. Every game in 1994 looked more or less like every other game because the hardware could only do so many things. Today you can play retro 8-bit games AND effectively CG film-quality narrative experiences on the same hardware. It’s crazy how expansive, varied and creative games have become.
Even if one thinks quality has gone down, though, it clearly isn’t because of consoles.
I think there are too many big franchises shaping the market. Some of them steer bad business fixations (see EA riding the licensed sports game MTX horse to hell) and most encourage a lot of me-too design (do we need another battle royale?)
Consoles worsen that with the Gilette model problem. Since most are sold at a loss, the vendor has to make it up on games, and constrain who releases software to those who will pay/revenue share for access. A galaxy of small devs and clever designs won’t even get past the secretary to see the guy who quotes the rate card.
To be fair, a huge appeal of a console for devs was the promise of a uniform experience. Every Xbox Series X Bellgrande With Chives is supposed to be practically equivalent, so you don’t have to worry about someone filing a ticket that the game runs weird when ran on an Athlon 64 FX-60 paired with a pre-production Intel Battlemage card.