I think it's silly to not think of Windows as the default "easier to support" option, because that's what it is.
"But X, —"
- iPhone/iOS's disabling of 32-bit app support
- MacOS/iOS's upkeep fees for "developer accounts"/app store access
- Android updates frequently break old apps or they get removed from the store (and more upkeep fees)
- Many Linux distributions, all with their own packaging/support nonsense
- Flatpak/Snap/Docker/whatever the "distribution is hard man I just want shit to run" solution du jour is helps this but you can kind of see the problem already with there being more and more variations
- Windows, by nature of its already immense install base, also has pretty good tools on other systems to run things; VMs, dual booting, etc. If you have a Windows game, there's a pretty good chance you can figure out how to get it running on MacOS or Linux. You have a MacOS game and want to play it on Windows? Good luck, pal.
You can still, right now, download the original cave story, for windows, a program with a last modified date of 18 fucking years ago, and it runs fine on modern Windows, with zero effort. I literally dragged it out of a zip archive and clicked it and boom, game. Hell, most older games seem to work pretty great. There's a few that don't, of course, but those are exceptions to the rules.
Windows, for all its flaws and faults, explicitly went out of their way to make compatibility a thing.
Microsoft, as shitty and garbage of a company as they are, did not decide x years ago "You know what? We're going to disable every single 32-bit program released for our device, just because we can, and there's nothing you can do about it."
I dropped support for Mac with my games not just because of audience size and bug report numbers, but because I needed to pay Apple every year for the privilege, as well as own and maintain Mac hardware for testing and building. I support Linux because at least it's free, I can dual boot to test, and also Linux users are generally pretty understanding of needing to do a little tinkering to have a good experience.
But I'm just not going to give Apple any more money to be one of their developers and get treated like shit.
My studio dropped Mac support literally the moment they added the stupid app stapling requirement. We had exactly one person on our team on a mac, and he wasn't a developer. It was literally easier for him to just buy a Windows machine to test on then it was for us to pipeline the whole process of getting the app built properly for mac. We didn't have any mac development machines. We weren't running Xcode anywhere. It was the >thousand dollar lead weight that broke the camel's back. The only reason Linux gaming is even relevant right now is because there's a privately funded multi billion dollar company (Valve) who's afraid of Windows doing the same thing. And it's only viable for developers to consider supporting it at all because it's almost no work, and most of the issues are considered bugs on Proton's end, not the application's side. And they also had to build an entire extremely high value hardware ecosystem around it as well to even have Linux market share be a meaningful fraction of the user base.