If all video games are developed on a pc, why aren't they all (or at least the vast majority of them) released as pc games?

Consoles have specific hardware and operating systems engineered for extremely fast and complex audio and video processing, which are highly computationally intensive. When game programmers write and test their code, they are optimizing it based on the benchmarks of that console (CPU number, speed and type, GPU number, speed and type, specific hardware drivers, etc). While they test some code on the PC, the real tests occur on the console itself and are targeted towards performance. PCs, while powerful in other ways, simply don't have that performance capability (some machines do, but only ones customized to do so). So the gaming experience just wouldn't be as good on most PCs, and the big game and console producers are in the business of selling a great gaming experience. If you want the best experience, you need a console to provide it (at least for the forsee-able future).

Although all games are developed on a PC in the sense that the code was typed on a PC, that doesn't mean that the games were developed to run on a PC. Games developed for a console would be written on a PC but would have to be run on the console itself (or possible through an emulator on PC). They won't run on PC. They would have to be ported to be able to run natively on PC.

Different codes are meant to be run on different machines. A code for a console game cannot be run on a PC (without the help of an emulator), and vice-versa. This is also why you can't run a PS3 game on another console like XBOX or Wii. They're simply different, so if you want to run a game on a different machine, it has to be adjusted ("Ported"). But why make them console in the first place? Anything made on PC is most likely going to be pirated -> less revenue Any effort to prevent pirating is going to be very complicated (DRMs, etc). This can be frustrating to the consumers (there isn't little protests over extreme anti-pirating policies that made things too difficult) and in the end it's useless anyway since people can and will find their way over it. Games sell consoles. Ever wonder why nintendo always release pokemon on their consoles? Because it's the biggest reason why people buy the consoles in the first place. Again, $$$ for the company Even for company who don't sell consoles, there can be contracts to make a game console-exclusive (which, again, sells the console and gives $$$ both to the console company and the game developer) Consoles ensure high-end machines. Not all PCs come with a guarantee of the newest graphics card and processor, and that can cause the game to be undersatisfactory to most consumers. Why make an awesome looking game if the majority won't bother to upgrade their PCs for it? But PCs aren't all bad. PCs are easy to work with. If I'm not mistaken, developing a console game requires a specific dev kit which might just not be accessible to everyone. Thus, most aspiring developers start at the PC. PC's mouse and keyboard also provide an unique input system, that provides more complexity compared to the few buttons consoles have However, if there's one thing PC extremely and exclusively excels at, it's user contribution. PC games that allow modding are usually the ones who thrive the longest, from the old-age Warcraft 3 (who still lives thanks to the DotA custom map) to the epicly modded Elder scrolls:Skyrim and/or Minecraft. It ensures the game is going to be enjoyed for much longer, and for developers who don't entirely aim for money, that might just be enough In the end, it's all up to the developers.

This answer will be somewhat technical, I will try my best to make it clear in layman's terms, but there are multiple reasons for that... and not all of them have necessarily to do with programming. First, it's important to understand that creating a game has several steps. Especially before a console is launched, it's not uncommon for a development kit to be a computer before actual specs are finalized. And even final devkits are not 1:1 equivalents of consoles. They are meant to be an environment to help create the building blocks of the game - and since code is usually not optmized at this juncture and have to manage the overhead of debugging routines, devkits usually have better specs than final hardware. But let's say that even then, your hardware was close to the kind of PC you would want your game to run. Each console has specific parts of the code that are native to their platforms. Even with APIs and managed code, the transfer is not necessarily a matter of pressing CTRL-C/CTRL-V on your source and recompile for Windows. However, beyond technical aspects, there are some that do not even relate to just getting the game running. Let's say you even ported the code. Now you have a game that optimized for consoles - and may run like crap on the average computer that a gamer has. At this point, you'd probably have to run Quality Assurance on several different hardware configurations to make sure your game doesn't crash and burn if the person has CPU X, GPU Y etc. This, in itself, is costly. On top of that, you probably will need to have technical support in place for the title, which is usually much harder to deal with on an open platform like PC (and thus, also costlier). All that work for what? A platform that doesn't have a company like Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo marketing it for you, has less shelf space on retail and with higher piracy rates (not to mention the work of porting even within this subgroup to different operating systems like Windows, MacOSX and whichever version of Linux you decide to support. When you actually put the cost and reward down on paper, it tends to look like a fairly bad business proposition. Which doesn't mean that I am opposed to the PC market. I think it enables a lot of great games that could otherwise be downright impossible on consoles for certain reasons. But with companies like Sony making it easier and easier for indie developers to get their games on an online storefront like PSN, it tends to go pretty low on the publishing priority list.

Imagine for a minute that all the game exclusives are now released on PC. Suddenly, there is absolutely no reason to buy a console, as new small PCs next to a TV with a wireless bluetooth controllers are a reality. Direct and easy streaming is just as possible as it is in the PS4. Achievements and other social mechanics can be both in-game and faked with websites and social networks. You can actually configure your controller as you please, instead of being limited to the developer's decisions. Using external software to map keys, you can actually do whatever you want with the input. You can upgrade your PC with new hardware to improve how the games are played on it. You can customize your screen background, your icons, the launchers, without paying anything, with your custom images and with packs made by fans. Now, there's no reason to save exclusives on your console. If you have to publish it on PC, the users that don't have your console will play it on PC and they won't buy it when you finally release it on all the consoles. There are other technical aspects that are already answered.

Actually, the situation is not so bad for the PC - most games get a PC release at the same time as consoles. And there are a lot of PC exclusives. And yes, the presumption that because games are developed on PC so should be easy to release on PC is really flawed. Development and deployment are two very different things. Consider android for example. Android apps are also developed on a pc, doesn't mean that they'll run on the pc. Hardware wise, the differences between pcs and consoles are really huge. So a game for a console cannot be directly run on a pc, excluding emulators, and those are possible only with a large amount of extra processing overhead - that's why we have emulators for old consoles, but not for the PS3 and Xbox360. So a game requires consider effort to port it from one platform to another. As for the question of downloads vs physical media, consoles also support digital downloads. Also, it can't be denied that piracy is way more rampant on the pc compared to consoles, because a console has to be cracked/hacked/jailbroken before it will run pirated games. On the PC though, pirated games are sometimes more convenient than legit ones because of all the pesky DRM attached with legit games. So, if a developer releases PC and console versions simultaneously, people are likely to pirate the game for the pc rather than buy it for consoles, and that's not good. Consider GTA V - a huge eagerly awaited game. Since Rockstar will release it's PC version at least a few months later, people go ahead and buy it rather that wait for the PC version.