I think console still do make sense insofar as that they provide developers the confidence that their game can run on a given set of hardware.
Yeah, they're mostly just a PC under the hood. But they're PCs with consistent hardware. How much easier would PC game development be if you know all of your customers had the same CPU, GPU, RAM, and OS?
That's not true due to hardware fragmentation and dynamic clocks anymore though. Which was the point that the root comment raised. Even first party titles sag to 20fps, and the settings screen of a modern console game contains more and more dials that are starting to look a lot like what you get in PC releases.
Yeah, they're mostly just a PC under the hood. But they're PCs with consistent hardware. How much easier would PC game development be if you know all of your customers had the same CPU, GPU, RAM, and OS?