Quote Originally Posted by Bartman
I hadn't considered the difference between strategy games (which are rare on consoles) and typical console-type games. You've got a good point.

I can think of a couple counter-examples though:

Sierra - Front Page Sports Football '99
(Was recalled. Everyone who asked got their money back. Sierra issued FOUR public apologies for the quality of the game, and eventually fired the entire sports software division. The amazing thing is that this game wasn't a new product. FPS Football had been around for a couple of years. How they managed to screw it up so bad in '99, when it was highly rated in '97 and '98 is still a mystery to me.)

Eidos - DeusEx Invisible War
(Several problems were so bad with the original release, that the game was virtually unplayable on many systems. The DeusEx series are single player FPS, available for XBox and PC. The XBox version played fine.)
Everyone not technical can ignore this post.. (although it is an interesting aside)...

PS2/Xbox/GC programming assumes one thing that can't be assumed away on PCs: A stable hardware/operating system/driver layer that does not change. Console developers simply do not have to contend with making sure their software runs on millions of unique configurations. If it works on Xbox number 1, it works on number 1,999,923. That vastly simplies the quality assurance problems and gives engineers a better chance of delivering working code the first time.

As observed above, there are always basic quality issues that some shops just can't seem to get right. But delivering good quality games comes within the reach of the 'average' engineering group (rather than requiring the rare 'stellar performer') when your testing solution set is so much smaller. I believe that is the true reason consoles look to consumers like generally higher quality.. Its because the testing/quality problem is different by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude for the engineers creating it and the test engineers testing it.

Finally, I also agree with the above statements on patched up quality against price. The market is topped regarding acceptable price, and patches keep most users happy. The model works and gaming companies will not respond until they can't sell product to survive with the current model.