Maybe, but that's not what I'm hearing. Devs are tired of managing 3 platforms every single generation. It would be much easier to have 1 platform and make the best vision of the director on said platform. The consoles will never catch up to the hardware innovations and so all the money is pouring into the development of games for all platforms (or at least on PC). PC is the agnostic hardware here -- that's why devs develop on it first and foremost.
I don't understand that. The vast majority of PC gamers will have hardware in the low-midrange. Heck the most popular graphics card on Steam is Intel integrated graphics. Yes, the PC will always be the most powerful at the high end, but the number of people who can afford to be at the cutting edge of PC hardware is absolutely tiny.
Heck, I have an RX480 4GB and a 6600K, and I don't plan on completely upgrading my hardware until AMD releases AM5 and Zen 4 (or whenever Intel can sort out their Fab situation can deliver a competitive desktop part in the midrange).
Besides, you've said it yourself. Consoles are just prepackaged PC's now. The hardware is fundamentally the same. Microsoft will use DirectX, and Sony will probably use some variant of Vulkan that's customised for their purposes. At the end of the day, at launch the next gen consoles will effectively be upper-mid range PCs. Building to those specs will mean that they can reach the widest possible audience.
If they develop games using Ryzen 9 4950s and Titan Amperes, or whatever the pinnacle of PC gaming hardware moves to every 18 months, then they're making games that 98% of the entire PC gaming audience will struggle to run.
I could be wrong of course. You have the experience, but that's honestly how I see it.
Nah. Next-gen is whatever hardware can show a leap in standard hardware. Next-gen visuals was here for over a year or more on the PC. When the PS5/XSX come out along with Ampere, it will be next-next-gen from the developers point of view, because they'll be making their games based on the best GPU on a PC and porting down to consoles --- again.
Porting down to consoles in the same way they'll be porting down to PC gamers who have low-end hardware. Surely its as simple as changing the settings to match the console hardware. Console's are just PC's now. There's no PowerPC cores, no Cell, no custom microarchitectures. Its all x86. How are consoles any different to your average mid-range PC?