Develop for Linux because that's the only platform I want to buy games for. ;-)

I have no inside knowledge of which platform is the most lucrative, but I'm guessing it's consoles since that's where most companies try to sell their big title money making games first.

Seems like the tech changes faster than I can learn it, but maybe I'm just a slow learner. Every time I get comfortable with something, the market makes me move. I learned the bulk of what I know in XNA. Microsoft abandoned it. I learned DX11. Microsoft is pushing me to Linux; so now I need to learn OGL4.5. By the time I get that figured out it will be time to learn Vulkan. All 3 of those moves have been to relearn everything from scratch which is time consuming.

As far as platform, there will always be new hardware, but so much of development today is cross platform. I mean there's an obvious difference between VR, mobile, and PC. I think the biggest difference is between mobile and non-mobile because of the controls and maybe to a lesser extent developing for full body VR.

VR is not going to take off until they start making games for it. It was maybe the mistake of the century to come to market without top of the line games before the release. (You need more than 1 or 2 and you need some real best sellers.) That may kill VR in the near future, although it's maybe still kind of in the beta stage as a technology. But as long as Elder Scrolls is not designed to run it, it's not going to sell. (I actually played Skyrim in VR for an hour or two and it was really cool, but you could tell it was not designed for it because there were significant issues). But VR actually has enormous potential. I can't imagine it failing to catch on eventually, even if it takes 1,000 years for them to get the marketing right. At some point people will figure out how cool it is and it will be so cheap there won't be any point in not doing it. But it's so expensive right now, that only the most die hard (like me) will buy it. So, at the moment I'm sure it's not a very lucrative platform to develop for.

But anyway, with cross platform development like Unity, why do you need to worry about the platform until you have made a few games and actually have a product to sell?

All the answers are very helpful, now I have better insight and better plans (hopefully).

The "hip and trendy" money making platforms change a bit too fast to really simply choose one and be done with it. Ideally you should write your games in such a way that they can be ported to a new platform in a short time span. This is not actually too hard but what it means in reality is not to lock yourself down to vendor specific languages or tools.

Remember that being locked into things like Unreal Engine and Unity will mean you will miss the boat when a new platform comes out because thay do take a long time to port their chunky engines across.

What I generally recommend is what you are using. C++ and SDL (and OpenGL if you need 3D). However learn to avoid Visual Studio because it will make you more flexible to port to other platforms. Some platforms that it does already support is:

Android: Using NDK and SDL, a game can often be ported in a couple of days

iOS: SDL has been ported. iOS apps can be written in C++ (and C which SDL is written in).

HTML5: Using Emscripten, your SDL code can be compiled into Javascript (asm.js) which can run in a browser (automatically using the HTML5 canvas do display.)

Windows: Standard platform

Linux: Standard Platform

*BSD: Standard platform

Mac OS X: Standard platform

Remember that 99% of software is still written in C. This really does make C the most portable language. Unfortunately it is a bit hostile to write games in so that is why I recommend C++ because it trades in a slight loss of portability with a very nice language (if you ignore the manky bits ;).

There are also hundreds of custom C and C++ compilers available (including C++/CLR that outputs to .NET IL like C#) making it very unlikely to lock you into a specific language or platform.

As for really locked down platforms (and I predict future platforms will be like this), Emscripten will likely be able to run your SDL / C++ game at about 70% speed. You can do this by using whatever crap they force you to write in to develop a very minimal http server (~20 lines of code) and open up the platforms web browser pointing to "localhost". Its a bit hacky but it gets your game out there :)

Avoid visual studio?

I've always heard this opinion that visual studio should be avoided (since its owned by Microsoft!), and I get confused.

I currently have Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and its great, the debugging tools are also helpful. I feel that if I develop with something like Code::Blocks, I'll miss a lot of features.

Do I have the option of developing and debugging with Visual Studio but using something like CMake (Never tried it but heard about it) for releasing it? So that I can port it to other platforms with the extra work of configuring the build system.

Or is there something still wrong in this?

BTW, what does standard platform mean?

And can I port to Mac using visual studio?

Avoid visual studio?

I've always heard this opinion that visual studio should be avoided (since its owned by Microsoft!), and I get confused.

I currently have Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and its great, the debugging tools are also helpful. I feel that if I develop with something like Code::Blocks, I'll miss a lot of features.

I don't think you neccessarily need to avoid Visual Studio just that you need to be able to code without becoming dependant on it. I spent most of my time C++ coding in Visual Studio but then it was a massive shock when I got a job at a big game studio where it was policy not to use it (the whole company used Vim and command line). Also in my current company the C++ programming test involves debugging using valgrind from a Linux terminal.

Yeah so don't avoid using it just be prepared for when you can't use it.

I think we can say that the current Microsoft is a mixed bag really. They recovered somewhat from their biggest screw ups of the recent years *cough*windows8*cough*... but they still seem to be unwilling to accept that this episode was just 3 years thrown down the drain and roll back to windows 7, start with windows 10 from there.

Don't get me wrong, windows 10 is okay... just not the big hit again that was windows 7. My work PC at home most probably will stay on Windows 7 until I really NEED DX12, there is no other reason for me to upgrade.

Then there is the "free" upgrade to windows 10. Its free, but you don't get a full license. I happened to be sitting on a PC with an unlicensed version of windows 10 because I had to exchange my mainboard after upgrading. Lo and behold, the license is locked to the hardware. Microsoft Support told me 2 options: either get a full windows 10 key (which means buy another copy of windows 10) if I do not want to reinstall, or first reinstall my windows 7, then upgrade again to windows 10 to get another windows 10 key.

Well sh*t... that means if you have an upgraded PC and anything happens to your hardware (which most of the time means dead mainboard), and the deadline for the free upgrade is over, you will need to either go back to Windows 7, live with an unlicensed windows 10, or go and buy another copy.

What happens when your OS is acting up and needs to be reinstalled is anyones guess.

So while giving out windows for free is nice to test the waters, I will certainly buy a full copy of windows 10 for my PCs at home and not bother with the upgrade. Having to reinstall two OS' everytime a machine needs to be reset is jsut additional work, and that new layer of uncertainity is also not appreciated. If I will have to get a new copy of Windows 10 anyway somewhere down the line (unless my PC chucks along without a problem, and without upgrades to the CPU), I might as well buy it now.

Then we have the fact everything is now connected to your windows ID... no, I don't want that. Opting out is actually quite involved. I have 2 Windows 10 PCs now setup with my Windows ID... I probably could go and change the user. But given that this happened twice to me means that its non-obvious how to setup a local user not connected to the Windows ID.

On the positive side, the MS Hardware is the shizzle. I really love my M3 equipped Surface 4. While Outlook for Android is kind of broken, Office 365 works like a charm for me (altough I do not use it that often)....

I really cannot complain too much about MS lately. Windows 7 was great, Windows 10 is okay, the MS Hardware is sweet, most office products I used that were not gimped by some company customization were great to use. All the while prices for end users at least are okay-ish, compared to Apple products.

If only MS would have moved their ass with DX BEFORE AMD kinda showed the way....

I think this discussion of the pros and cons of various Microsoft products, services and strategic decisions is veering a little too far off-topic at this point.