I frankly never understood the real reason why Fez was released exclusively for xbox. From the outsider perspective it seems like a very bad decision when it comes to a game as hyped as this one was.
Fez started development over 4 years ago when steam wasn't as big for indies as it is now, they probably signed an agreement back then giving exclusivity to Microsoft for a period of time after initial release on XBLA in return for some promotion.
Do you have any numbers to back you up? I couldn't find any. All I got pointed the Wii as worldwide sales leader and 360 and PS3 more or less tied in second place. The 360 seems to have a small lead over the PS3 in the US (with Wii coming in third), but that's all.
Console numbers shouldn't be a metric here - I own all three consoles, only use the Xbox for gaming.
What should be counted is actual money spent inside the platform's online ecosystem - kinda curious myself how PSN is doing compared to Xbox Live. I'll have to look this up when I get a chance.
There are C#/XNA games on Steam. The developer, Phil Fish, claims it's built specifically for the "console/couch" experience on a Saturday morning (seemingly unaware that many people connect their PCs to televisions and sit on the couch).
Do you have any data backing up the claim that a significant number of people connect their pcs to their televisions? Outside of the tech industry I imagine this is simply not a large consumer base.
It's definitely not huge, but anecdotally I have heard of more and more people doing this. More PC games support the use of an XBox 360 controller and more video cards have an HDMI out than ever before.
Also, this has been an unusually long console hardware cycle resulting in there being a much bigger gap between PC and console graphics.
Hundreds of thousands of people could play Braid on their PCs, how does that differs from playing Fez?
Is not about how many people connect their PCs to their televisions, but about how they enjoy playing their games. IMHO that does not justify the Microsoft exclusivity strategy.
