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Independent developers need money to fund the development, being exclusive to a platform gives you those funds, as well as marketing and various other forms of secondary support.

The alternatives are a publisher (historical a pretty mixed bag, gaining control of your IP, changing the focus or name - see Divine Divinty) or crowd-funding (usually not enough to fund the entire project, unless you're Star Citizen :)).

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> Independent developers need money to fund the development, being exclusive to a platform gives you those funds

How exactly? You can say that releasing for a single platform reduces costs. But how can it give you more funds? Marketing isn't really bound to limiting platforms (only expenses wise, same as development). However covering more platforms gives games more exposure, so more potential sales.

Cross platform tools are quite good these days (SDL2, etc.) so overhead of cross platform releases while still present is going down. A lot of the independent games of interest that come out these days are cross platform to my knowledge.

Console makers will sign deals giving you advance funding if you promise to make the game exclusive to their platform.

I see. That stinks, but I can understand why some developers can fall for this. Crowdfunding is a good alternative to prevent such kind of lock-in.

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