[jperry]

But it's not true.

There's absolutely no restriction on game development machines except that the provided tools (probably) only run on Windows.

[mikl]

But you can only sell your Xbox, PS4 or Switch game through Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo (correspondingly), and you have to agree to their terms and pay whatever cut they want to take of your sales price.

[leadingthenet]

Well that by itself is a big restriction.

[jperry]

It's not an intentional one though, it's just what the tools happen to run on. Sony aren't going to come after you if you run their SDK in a VM or something.

Apple intentionally restrict developers to only use Apple hardware and software to keep the ecosystem contained.

[muststopmyths]

And you can build Xamarin apps on Windows. I think the point is more about what you can put on a console, the content restrictions, marketing etc.