It is no secret that most games are designed first and foremost for consoles and ported to PC - usually as an afterthought. This is how we ended up with some unplayable AAA titles such as Batman: Arkham City. The PC version of the game was a train wreck, publisher Warner Bros. Entertainment gave up on trying to fix it and opted to refund disgruntled buyers.
Arkham City is not the first botched up PC port and it certainly won't be the last. Basically, publishers know that more game copies are sold on consoles than on PC, so they treat the later as a second class citizen.
One of the few titles that broke this convention is Battlefield 1 which was developed as a proper high end PC game. This reversal is actually the result of how EA decided to turn its development process around. According to CFO Blake Jorgensen, the giant publisher has decided to develop all its games going forward for high end PCs then scale them down for consoles.
"You won’t see much margin upgrade at all," he told the audience at the UBS Global Technology Conference. "We build all of our games to the highest possible spec, which is typically a high-powered PC, and as the consoles come in, [which] may not be the highest spec, we may actually dummy down the console product to meet the spec of the console. In a world where the console looks more and more like a PC, that’s good for us."
EA has recently moved all its games to the Frostbite Engine, which allows it to focus all its efforts on optimizing one engine "rather than 25."
