Previously the Doom/Quake version that was on console would be months/years late and cut down, but these 2003/2004 titles reversed the trend. There are probably earlier examples that I am unaware of.
Between this effect, subscription MMORPGs and the inevitability of microtransactions I lost interest around that time.
> the PC port is deliberately gimped due to being developed for console.
If you want to have a mature discussion on the topic don't start out with this attitude. Timelines are finite, and plans change. Remember that the games you're talking about existed before licensing ue4/unity was the default option for AAA games. The games were likely only ever planned to exist on console and the request for PC cones in way later, however at that time the game just barely runs on PC (it doesn't need to be performant or representative, just play), and relies on an engine architecture based on having cell SPEs or an (almost) unified memory architecture.
The game is likely unplayable for anything other than "test you can do X and Y" on PC, and all development of the look and feel is done on the console itself. Naturally as consoles have moved towards x86 these differences have been reduced, and now it's common to develop the game on PC and test occasionally on console.
The differences do still exist though; PS5 having hardware decompression, dualsense controllers, both consoles having raytracung hardware and super fast SSDs as a guarantee.
> Between this effect, subscription MMORPGs and the inevitability of microtransactions I lost interest around that time.
You've missed 2 decades of excellent games that don't suffer from this, don't have subscritions and don't have microtransaction by doing that!
Please do not take my opinion as a personal affront to your career, and I sympathise with the difficulties in the industry.
Don't worry about my missing out, I had plenty of other things to do during that time. I have since regained a temporary interest and caught up on the offline single player PC games of interest to me over the course of lockdown restrictions, but console games are not for me. Invisible-War stands out as an abomination, prompting my comment.
The Ion storm games I mention ran poorly on an unreal 2 engine compared to their predecessors and the GTA ones were developed in parallel, there was no change of plan, it's a statement of fact in those cases rather than an attitude.
The console market is huge as not everyone is tech savvy enough to maintain a gaming PC and bother with all the OS updates, driver updates, patches, HW upgrades and such. Lots of people just want to hop on the couch after school/work, pick up the controller and start playing.
And since the console market is so big, it made financial sense for the game studios to use them as the lowest common denominator during development. More sales on more platforms = more $$$, despite the PC ports ending up sub-par.
The dark ages ware during the PS3 and Xbox 360 days since those consoles used custom CPU/GPU architectures, radically different than PCs, which coupled with the low quality of the SW tooling and SDKs of the era made cross-platform game development a nightmare at the time so more often than not games made for both console and PCs turned out janky AF.
But thankfully, since the last couple of console generations are basically x64 AMD APU powered PCs, and SW tooling is way simpler and more efficient and of higher quality so game devs can scale their engines and visuals much easier between console and PC reducing the quality discriminations.
However, I have noticed that console gaming experience has gotten a lot more janky in the last few generations as their HW and SW have reached PC levels of complexity, with long waiting times, errors and crashes being more common than in the days of ROM cartridges. The new and powerful SSD-only, generation of consoles seem to reverse that trend though and bring back a snappy and more responsive UX.
Although I gave up on modern gaming for the most part, especially the over-hyped AAA titles, the progress on the tech side pleases me (baring the chip shortage scalpocalypse we live in)
IIRC the first "Watch Dogs" game had deliberately downgraded graphics on PC compared to the previews and it was later found that changing a value in some config file would not only return the better looks but also lead to a boost in performance.
Consoles and PC have influenced eachother- how many PC gamers today use controllers? The distinction has blurred somewhere in the 2010s.
Combine that with the availability issues that plagued the current-gen console launch, and the actual comparison of PCs used as gaming machine and consoles in people's houses is much closer.
