There are actually a fair number of industry professional developers (including L. Spiro) in the community who have access to dev-kits through their work.
The difficulty and cost involved in access to dev-kits is a big part of the reason PC (and mobile, which is a very popular target you left out of your original question) is so popular as a target for home, hobbyist and indie projects. There also tend to be more publicly available resources for learning to target PC.
- Jason Astle-Adams
Stephen M. Webb
Professional Free Software Developer
Unless your game only runs on a Steam Box (why?), you'd treat it as a PC game.
I've only shipped games for console (360) in the past for or five years, but I'm moving back towards PC.
They aren’t my personal dev-kits, they are at my office.
I work for a game company called tri-Ace.
L. Spiro
Wow they go all the way back to the SNES/Super Famicom
There are actually a fair number of industry professional developers (including L. Spiro) in the community who have access to dev-kits through their work.
The difficulty and cost involved in access to dev-kits is a big part of the reason PC (and mobile, which is a very popular target you left out of your original question) is so popular as a target for home, hobbyist and indie projects. There also tend to be more publicly available resources for learning to target PC.
But thats changing right, self-publishing on Ouya, project MOJO, Vita TV.
Can't forget homebrew, the Dreamcast getting a new release every year, almost the same for NES, Genesis.
Easiest way to make games, I love LÖVE && My dev blog/project
*Too lazy to renew domain, ignore above links
Is the Steam Box a PC or a console?
I think the Steam Box would fall under the PC umbrella.
The point of a console is that every unit contains the same basic hardware; as a developer you don't have to worry about the large variety of hardware configurations available on other platforms (unless you're developing for multiple consoles at once, which is common).
Steam boxes are just PCs running Valve's new flavour of Linux. I think that steam boxes can even be produced by third parties.
My list is very similar to L Spiro's. Professionally I have worked on these:
Neither, I currently develop exclusively for the browser with HTML5.
At work I develop for the "current" and "next" gen consoles, as well as PC. In the past I've worked on PSP, Wii, and 3DS as well (very briefly a little bit of DS as well).
At home I stick with PC, although I generally don't release anything. I haven't looked at my contract in years but technically my employer owns the game software I build at home. If I really wanted to sell something I'm sure I could get legal permission though.
