PC Games and PC Gamers?

PC's are a smaller market. Of course they're in it for the Benjamins, if it weren't for the Benjamins there wouldn't be commercial games at all. There are some good user-created PC games though, mostly shooters.

The thing about PC's is, inconsistent architecture. If a developer wants to make a game for PC, they have to decide whether it's gonna be a game that uses all the gears of a dual-core PC - a relatively small market - or be compatible with slower-single cores. They also have to make it work on both intel and AMD processors, and with both ATI and NVIDIA cards. And with all ranges of RAM from 512mb upwards. They have to decide, are the players gonna be that core of key-and-mouse freaks, or does it need to work with a gamepad?

Ultimately, the better a PC game is, the fewer PC's it will run on. This is why the only ones that use a lot of processor power are the fps, because they have a dedicated customer core who will buy them. However this core is nowhere near as many people as have consoles. That is why commercial PC games have been forced basically into two small niches: key-and-mouse fps like UT, and rpg like Elder Scrolls or WoW.

Those PC-niche titles are often exclusive to PC, but they're the only ones that are, mostly.

The PC game market also fluctuates compared to how advanced PC hardware is, compared to console hardware. Back in the 1980's, the Commodore 64 stole video games away completely from consoles for several years. But Nintendo sneaked up and stole it back. In the last generation of consoles, as the consoles aged, PC's got better but the consoles didn't. This made more people choose pc's and made the market bigger. But the ps3 and xbox360 were designed to catch, literally, all the way up. Now you see PC's holiest of holies, Unreal Tournament, released on ps3. Elder Scrolls has made the jump too. So the PC game market is shrinking again.

Overall, with comparable hardware, developers prefer a stable platform that promises lots of potential buyers, and where they don't have to worry about being compatible with various different architectures.

If you want to see some games made by loyal devs, check out sauerbraten, a brilliant fps free to download. Or legends, or Wolfenstein Enemy Territory or its mods.

I would say that the "main" reason for PC games being delayed when they are released on multiple platforms is a technical one. When developers are making a game for the xbox 360 or PS3 there is only one hardware configuration that the developers will build and test a game on. This means that the game can develp faster bcause there are a lower number of uncertainties with how the game will perform with a given set of hardware for a particular platform. PC is hardest to develp for because there are so many different video cards, motherboards, CPUs, etc. With the console there is only one configuration of hardware so the programming is much easier. Quality testing and "compatibility" take much longer on the PC.

There are games that come out for the PC that later get transported to the 360. 1 example is Supreme Commander. And other games are released at the same time. Orange box and COD4 are examples.

In addition to that, PC gamers have games that consoles will never get. Sins of Solar empire, Crysis, Starcraft 2, World in Conflict, Soulstorm, etc.

it is cheaper to build it yourself, but you have to make sure that all the parts are compatible with each other, when i was younger i used to build my own pcs, now that im older and i have a job, i just buy them to save me the hassle of configuring it and getting everything to work. for a gaming pc, processor, ram and graphics card are very important, fast hard drive will help too, but not as important as the previous 3 components. intel has the fastest cpus, so i would stick with that, obviously you cant use an amd processor with an intel mobo. always go with the quad, if you can afford it, go with the i7, otherwise the older core2quads would do. for 2000 you should be able to build a very nice system

I suppose it is because not as many people buy PC games.

Also by being exclusive to a system means that people may just buy a system so they can play the game.