system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do video game developers choose to only release games only on some consoles/PC but not others? How much more work does it take to program a game to operate on a different console, say Switch vs Playstation for example?
gpt
It takes a lot of work. Consoles tend to have less power than PCs and each of the major consoles uses a different operating system. PC and Xbox share a lot of internal code, but PCs have thousands of combinations of parts, compared to the consoles all using the same processors. For a small studio this is a lot of work. 

In general game companies have two options: make a game run okay on all platforms or really well on one. I’m a PC gamer, but I’m shocked at how well God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn run on the PS4. Knowing exactly what hardware your game will run on is a major help to optimization.

And also, game companies sometime sign contractors to only release on a single console. Sony may pay a company a million to not sell their game on the Xbox. Or in the case of Bethesda: Microsoft owns them, so they’ll be making almost exclusively PC and Xbox games from now on.


There you go, it takes a lot of people and time to make a good cross platform game, and there’s a lot of money involved in keeping games from getting ported.