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DarkFireGerugex t1_je7mrb6 wrote

The thing about PCs is that you don't have "one" you have multiple PCs with many different specs/equipment you can't really think about "everyone's pc" and sometimes optimizing it for a 3060TI (just throwing some random graphic card here) might crash on a 1080TI (same here).

While on a console you develop a game for the "PS4" and the specs would never change because it's just one so you optimize the game to run on that specific spec the best way it could.

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E_Snap t1_je7mu7i wrote

Consoles are a sterile and predictable computing environment— you know exactly what hardware you’re going to be running on, and nothing else will compete for system resources. PCs are not. They could be grandma’s virus-laden netbook from 2008, your own immaculately cared for 4090-powered gaming mega-tower, and everything in between. It’s impossible to account for every edge case along that entire spectrum when developing software.

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Dabliux t1_je7nlrw wrote

PCs are way more diverse than consoles.

When you make a console, it has the exact same components everywhere. PCs, on the other hand, can be very different from each other, having different components, different operating systems, and many other factors. This makes it way harder for developers to properly test their games for each different system, leading to more crashing and performance issues. That's the reason why many games on Steam are released as Early Access, which can help detect as many bugs as possible from many systems with the help of the community.

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This is the first thing that comes to mind

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maveric_gamer t1_je7qe7k wrote

Any given PC can have one of about 50 configurations each of CPU, GPU, RAM, Motherboard, hard drive space, hard drive speed, plus any number of other things running in the background while a game runs.

The big advantage in that regard that consoles have is that every single one has identical hardware.

An anecdote that can illustrate this: a long time ago I was really into the game Saints Row 2. I have it on PC and played with a couple friends. When playing multiplayer, with one friend our games had weird bugs where his character or mine would seem to teleport around and mission timers didn't work right. Another friend, I didn't have any of these problems with.

It clicked when I realized that the friend I had no problems with had actually helped with my PC build, built his at the same time, and we built functionally the same computer - the only real difference was in hard drives and that wasn't a huge factor. Saints Row was, in its first iteration, an XBox 360 exclusive and SR2 was supposed to be until it got a PC port - as a result, the game had no mechanism built in for how to deal with synchronizing two processors that ran at different clock speeds.

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PckMan t1_je7reu8 wrote

Because consoles have much fewer variables. There can only be so many things running in the background of a console and the system is always the same. Contrast that with computers, which may have different operating systems or different versions, different systems and a whole bunch more programs or processes running along side the game which may inadvertendly cause issues, it's much harder to account for every possibility in the case of PCs.

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