70% of sales on console are digital now and rising.
For one, I don't believe it's that high. For two, that's still a huge 30% and that's not insignificant.
You still have at least 30% physical sales and that cut to the retailer. Neither of us can measure the exact impact, so you can't just quote this and act like PC games being cheaper on average for the long term completely offsets this and leads to publishers losing more money, especially when that lower average per copy is often countered by a higher volume over time.
Stuttering is only example of negative impacts of PC ports. The reality is the way UE5 works, it's extremely difficult to get rid of stutter. It's just the nature of the beast, but that's not the only thing that can make a PC port bad.
Stuttering is the single biggest problems. Arguably THE problem. Let's review the bad PC ports lately:
Jedi Survivor - Stuttering
Silent Hill 2 - Stuttering
Dead Space Remake - Stuttering
Gotham Knights - Stuttering
Find my horrible ports that weren't considered terrible due to stutters. Maybe TLOU?
God of War Rangarok doesn't use Unreal Engine.
Shader compilation isn't something unique to Unreal my guy. It has been a thing for decades. Not every UE game stutters and likewise, not every non-UE game is stutter-free. The point I'm making is that other devs also have to deal with PSO caching but they do it properly. When you see that little thing of shaders compiling on PC, but you still end up with a stuttering game, it means that not every PSO has been cached and they compile in real time. The guys at Jetpack could have had the same problem but they said:
Very early on we decided not to just have QA play the game and accumulate PSOs that way, then ship some pre-known set and hope in the wild that players don't look off into a corner. We did the full build offline and created the PSOs offline, so all of the data is known beforehand in the pipeline for us, and it took us a substantial amount of time to get that right.
The first thing they describe is what most devs do, including those using UE. Hellblade 2 is buttery smooth for the most part and uses Unreal Engine, so clearly, with due diligence, getting rid of stutters is entirely possible, and it won't cost 10s of millions in engineering and QA that would rightfully make the publisher recoil. So the argument that PC doesn't make enough money upfront completely ignores the reality of what problems plague PC ports. No one is asking devs to optimize games like they do on consoles. No one is asking devs to implement features that can make PCs rivals the consoles I/O solutions. We're just asking for games that don't stutter and answering us with, "well, devs don't bother because it would cost too much money" is asinine.