It's fairly clear when games are designed for console first or for PC first. For example, Battlefield 3 on the console didn't have some of the fundamentals of a AAA first person shooter title, such as making sure it runs at 60 frames a second. Details like those were reflected in their Metacritic score, where the PC version stood significantly above its console counterparts.

Ironically, Battlefield 3 has sold roughly 2M PC copies, 6M Xbox copies, and 5M PS3 copies. [1,2,3] It was numbers like these that caused most of the game franchises to switch to console if they weren't already focused on them. A lot started out being PC-focused such as Ghost Recon, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell and The Elder Scrolls come to mind, but all of their latest franchise titles are heavily designed as console games first.

I would argue that first person shooters are a dying genre on PCs through just looking from the competitive scene with gaming. While there is still may be a lasting Counter Strike scene, the focus has gone to the latest Halo or Call of Duty being played on a console for competitive FPSs.

It just happens to be that some game genres really don't work well on the console no matter how hard you try. Halo Wars was well done as a console designed RTS, but just doesn't have the same depth as its PC counterparts such as Starcraft or Warcraft due to the restrictions on the interface and controls.

Even if you do manage to design for the platform, a lot of games just don't work.

[1] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/35315/battlefield-3/ [2] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/40231/battlefield-3/ [3] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/40230/battlefield-3/

user:	timee
created:	March 14, 2012
karma:	36