Why Capcom games are often late to PC

With both Resident Evil 6 and Street Fighter X Tekken due to launch on consoles a while before they hit PC, you may be wondering, why are the PC editions of Capcom's games so often late? The answer's simple: because they start them later.

"Quite often, PC development starts when the console development finishes or nearly finishes," Capcom USA senior VP Christian Svensson posted on the Capcom Unity forum in response to a fan's question (via Eurogamer).

"Unless we start sitting on the console code and not releasing it until the PC development is complete (which we can't do from a business planning perspective), there's going to continue to be some small gaps unfortunately."

"We try to keep the gap as small as possible and at times, we have been able to make them simultaneous (Dark Void, Bionic Commando, BCR, MotoGP, Dead Rising 2, Dead Rising 2:OTR)," Svensson said, though let's note most of these were developed externally.

"Oh, and Arcade Edition was shipped on PC within 1 week of the console retail release (which I'd consider pretty much simultaneous)."

One might wonder, then, why doesn't Capcom start work on PC editions earlier in the development process? Ah, that'd be telling!