Why spend $100 million to target the best possible PC, a small market that doesn't pay a premium for the investment, and sacle down, when you could instead spend $50 million to target a common denominator which the high-end PC market will buy anyway?
You need to present an econmic reason why it's better business to spend more on higher quality experienced by a tiny fraction of the market. Typically in business I think this is for the Halo Effect, but the PR of that is probably not worth the direct marketing you could get for less investment.
As we've seen throughout the years, graphics in games is just another form of marketing. From "shots" on the back of boxes to advertisements in magazines and now reviews and other factors. Graphics nowadays has minimal impact on gameplay, yet it has significantly more clout WRT marketing.
I remember when PC screenshots were used to market console versions of games. That was fairly common up until the point where consoles became the primary dev. target and even then it's not uncommon to see PC footage used in advertisements for the console versions of games.
To put it another way, why do companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and brand image? For the same reason that publishers prefer to sell their games based on a screenshot of their game rather than a video of their game. Screenshots don't generally show rendering artifacts that are far more noticeable when a game is in motion (especially temporal artifacts). In both cases you are investing money to elevate the consumer consciousness that your product is the best for the target market because of X thing. In the case of games, unfortunately (IMO), this tends to be dominated by discussions about graphics rather than the far more important gameplay (again, IMO).
For games, graphics have historically been a large selling point regardless of whether that level of graphics exists only on X platform but not Y or Z platforms. Or in the case of PC on A000001 combination of hardware but not on A000002, A000003 ... AXXXXXX combination of hardware.
Graphics, thankfully aren't the only reason people buy games, but WRT a AAA publisher or AAA developer marketing their game it's likely by far the largest marketable point for their game. And thus unfortunately to the detriment of AAA games, publishers and developers with that level of budgeting (AAA) will quite happily sacrifice gameplay in order to be able to claim to have the best graphics or at least competitive graphics if they can't have the best.
Basically for AAA developers, graphics set the stage for both initial gamer investment as well as it's potential pool of buyers. The worse the graphics the fewer people will pre-order it and the fewer people will consider potentially forking over 60-70 USD on the game.
So, if a AAA developer can distance themselves from other AAA developers by having noticeably better or more pleasing graphics they'll in turn be rewarded by greater consumer interest which leads to greater pre-orders and as long as the gameplay isn't complete dog shite (pardon my language) then also increased lifetime sales.
NOTE - I'm not saying graphics are the ONLY reason people buy games, but prior to a game coming out, other than developer/IP reputation and name recognition, graphics are by far the most important thing for a AAA game to have.
BTW - unlikely those large investments in marketing, targeting the best hardware will generally mean a better looking game all the way down the hardware chain as long as the developers are at least relatively competent with making a scalable engine.
Or think of it another way. As a AAA developer you'll most likely
need to sell well on PC in addition to selling well on PS and XB and for some publishers you even need to sell well on NSW in addition to PC, PS and XB. You can just half ass it on PC and get X level of sales or you can treat it like a proper platform and get a greater level of sales. Basically, as a developer, are you feeling lazy and want to just leave money on the table or not?
Regards,
SB