Why aren't all games available on all platforms?

Question

Is there a technical reason as to why aren't all games released on every platform, or is it just marketing/politics?

I'm guessing that would cause you to buy a playstation if you really like a game that's only available there, but perhaps there's also other reasons.

Answer

There are many different reasons for not supporting every game on every platform.

1. Money Involved: Consider the case of Games for Windows and the Xbox games, although almost every game can be ported between these two platforms (excellent ports of Dead Space and Gears of War come to mind) but Microsoft will not do that(Gears of War2, Halo2,3), because that may impact the sales of Xbox in a negative manner. Similarly the games produced and published by Sony Computer Ent. will not be released on Xbox or Windows. What I think is Games released for Xbox give a huge chunk of money to MS (because of the licensing), games released for Windows add a lower amount and hence the former are released by both MS and others(EA, Ubisoft, Activision etc) and latter are generally released by others.

2. Technical Difficulties: Porting a game from PS3 to Xbox is very difficult as the guys above said they use totally different libraries.

3. Debugging factor: Every Xbox has same architecture, so is every PS3. Releasing a game on these 2 is easier and the debugging afterwards is still easier. A game which crashes on one Xbox (because of developer side bug) can be patched easily. But n different PCs generally have n different configurations, what causes a bug due to my Nvidia driver may not cause the bug in your updated/older driver or an ATI graphics card.

4. Piracy: There is no need to say that games are easily pirated on PC than on any other platform. The architecture plays a very important role. The general purpose functionality of PC makes it easily crackable but the other dedicated platforms makes it extremely difficult and the cracks can be "filled" with a firmware upgrade.

5. Scaling: For platforms like PSP, you need to do a LOT of scaling which makes the process difficult or rather impossible. PC games are generally released later than the console counterparts so that the designers get time to scale down the game. This directly affects the sales as more people can now play the game. The initial release of GTA4 PC was frowned upon by the gamers as the "scaling down" they did wasn't up to the mark.

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