An article on the BBC notes that “Rising development costs and small user bases mean games developers are unlikely to make a profit on new titles until 2008…”

Development costs are increasing largely due to increased complexity in the games being developed - this has led many companies to increase the size of their development teams and so increase their production costs. Time-to-market is also increasing as a result.

To try and recoup money “many games publishers were choosing to release the same game across as many different hardware platforms as possible to access the widest possible user base”. This is a strategy I’ve seen mobile games developers use - although in the absence of a Software Product Line strategy porting costs can be as high as 50% of the total development budget.

However, some companies are taking a single-platform approach. For example, Epic’s Gears of War is noted as being exclusively developed for the Xbox 360. The author of the original article (Next Generation Consoles: Games publishing, hardware analysis and forecasts to 2010)  suggests that this approach is only viable for developers if they’re given additional payment to mitigate the (market) risk of single platform development.