We're talking about small dev houses though - they can't help but "write off" large swathes of potential customers at any given time because they simply haven't got the resources to pull off a massive multiplatform release like the big pubs can. So somebody's platform of choice is always going to be waiting for their turn with the projects of this scope. Seems increasingly obvious that devs are just going to take their chances with being the "exception" to MS' parity clause and/or wait for it to die a quiet death.
Without question, but again, that works to Microsoft's advantage, and they clearly don't care about any disadvantages it may impose on the developer. If you can only support one platform at a time, then the question is which platform do you support first? Under normal circumstances, the obvious answer would be whichever platform is likely to give you the greatest returns with the least amount of effort and risk on your part. Launch parity throws that equation completely out of whack.
Normally, you'd launch your game to 67% of your audience, and if it doesn't fail miserably, you'd go back and release a port to the remaining 33%. However, Microsoft don't allow you to support their platform if you've already supported another, while Sony do. So now your choice is to release to the smaller audience first, or be locked away from them forever. That's a much tougher choice, by design.
So again, as long as users continue to buy XBox, that justifies the continuation of the policy. Every single console they sell makes it that much harder for devs to say, "Screw you and your shitty policies. We don't need you anyway." Microsoft is banking on the idea that at some point they'll have enough users to make it all but impossible for developers to say such things, at which point they'll have no choice but to bring their game exclusively to XBox.
yeah at the start of the gen the x1 had sdk issues, however it does run vanilla dx11 and soon dx12. so if developing on PC it would be a very simple port to the x1.
i dont know why an indie dev would choose to develop on ps4 first when this is the case.
By all accounts, Sony's tools are actually quite nice, and designed specifically to ease porting from PC.