I woundn't say this is suprising news. Most of the big companies and triple-a studios have been in a race to the bottom in recent years, and these are the main companies marketing and selling to console and mobile users. PC on the other hand, has always been less ruled by the big players and thus hasn't been as impacted.
PC gamers all have different machines, which must make optimization a nightmare. Additionally, those with shitty machines are giving games bad reviews based on their own limitations. So much easier to pirate a game on PC. I heard something like 30% of gamers pirate at least some games.
Doesn't look like an attractive market to be honest. I'm not surprised companies just went with consoles
Edit: get mad all you want but I'm thinking of this as a capitalist issue, and game corporations only care about your money, not your convenience
Shared libraries/dynamically-linked libraries, along with faster storage solve a lot of the historical optimization issues. Modern compilers and OSes general take care of that, if the right flags are used. With very few AAA games using in-house engines, it's even less work for the studio, supposing the game engine developers are doing their jobs.
That said, you do still have a bit of a point. Proper QA requires running the software on all supported platforms, so, there is a need for additional hardware, if not offloading QA to customers via "Early Access". Adding to that, there are new CPU architectures in the wild (or soon to be) that weren't there 5 years ago and may not yet be well-supported with the toolchains.
Gaben is absolutely correct on practice though, it's a distribution problem. EA, Epic, and the rest trying to force their storefront launchers and invasive DRM that makes the experience worse for the end users drives people to pirate more.
PC gamers all have different machines, which must make optimization a nightmare.
DirectX, Vulkan and OpenGL do all of the talking to the hardware, those have been around for a very long time. The imaginary issue of 'you have to target millions of configurations' is simply not true.
I'm simply stating the issues that are brought up by the game companies themselves. At the end of the day you don't have to believe them but you have to accept that they're capitalists, and if they're not interested in the PC game market, it's because it isn't profitable or worth going after.
You'd be best to not repeat pr statements if you don't know about the underlying technology then. Companies will say whatever they think sounds best and won't immediately get them in obvious trouble.
You're buying into brand war bullshit. I'm not in Playstation threads telling them to get a pc. You're here defending nameless companies that dont care about you.
Play and buy the things that make you happy, a lot of people aren't happy with console offerings as of late. That's all it is, there is no righteous crusade, it's video games man.
Nobody cares what investors think, games are an artform and the PC market is most accessible to small creators. Yeah investors care about the things you say and so we might not get "action game with rpg mechanics and crafting 14 battle pass edition" on PC until they milk console sales, but there's plenty of amazing content that's PC first