system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What makes developing for Xbox and PlayStation so different from PCs. Aren't they also just computers?
gpt
* Console pick a resolution and stick with it. If the target is 720p, the game will render at 1280x720 and upscale to 1920x1080 or downscale to 852x480. Games that have been scaled look like crap; PC gamers *demand* that games render at the native resolution of their monitor. Any game that doesn't is (properly) derided as crap. If there is only one resolution to render at, the designers can make a huge number of assumptions that greatly simplify development.
* Every user of a console game uses the same controller. The people that *don't* use that controller use a controller that emulates the normal controller. On the other hand, PC gamers not only demand that games work with whatever bizarre keyboard or speed pad or keypad or joystick they own, but they demand that the game allows buttons to be remapped to suit their similarly bizarre purposes. Ask 100 different WoW players what buttons do what and you'll get 150 different responses.
* Every console has the same CPU, the same video card, the same amount of RAM, the same storage medium, and none of them have any processes running in the background. If a game encounters a slowdown in a certain situation, the game will *always* slow down there on every single console owned by every single user every single time. You can then optimize that section or cut detail in that section. On the other hand, some PCs are CPU limited, some PCs are GPU limited, some PCs are memory bandwidth limited, some PCs are memory quantity limited, some PCs have more or less disk space or disk speed, some PCs have resident programs (malware, malware scanners, a browser that was left open with a flash animation running, crappy OEM software like picture organizers that are always running, the hideous monstrosity that is HP's printer suite) that sop up any given resource, and you typically can't predict the slow parts. You'll need to expose every detail setting to the user to enable them to configure it, and then you'll need to know when the user is a fucking moron and override some of their settings if you need to.
* Video cards from ATI and nVidia behave much differently. There are differences between each generation of video cards, sometimes drastic ones. You need a few different rendering paths, and need to pick the right one depending on what hardware is available. Consoles do not have this problem. Other devices can have similar problems (sound cards might perform certain functions slowly or at the use of a lot of CPU) and in all cases you need to be more tolerant of whacky inputs.
* PC gamers are, to varying degrees, tolerant of bugs at launch, console gamers are not. Console gamers are more tolerant of minor bugs that persist, PC gamers do not tolerate bugs that are not eventually fixed.