This November, XCOM 2

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“ Our expertise here is PC. That's our home, and that's where we're really comfortable.

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“ We talk about ‘What is the experience like on PC? What does the mouse feel like?'

Running The Numbers

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“ Solomon wouldn’t rule out a console version.

It certainly surprised us. Considering XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within initially came out on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, and have since even been ported to iOS and Android, narrowing focus to a single platform for the sequel seems to defy conventional game-development wisdom. But if there’s a developer out there that knows how to be successful making PC games, it’s Firaxis. The Maryland-based studio is best known for the Sid Meier’s Civilization series, which (other than the Civilization: Revolution console and mobile spinoffs) has resolutely stuck to its PC roots for 20 years.Focusing all of Firaxis’ efforts on the PC made logistical sense to DeAngelis, too. “Internally, with a relatively small team for the size of the game that we are, to be able to say we can focus on our platform that the studio has a pedigree for, and that X-COM: UFO Defense has a pedigree for, as PC-only... it just made a lot of sense, and that's how we wanted to dedicate our time.” XCOM 2 runs on a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 3.5 (Firaxis’ customizations are too extensive to easily move to Unreal 4), which in some ways has been rewritten to the point of being “unrecognizable,” and it’s much simpler to make that work on one platform than three or more at once.Does this decision make business sense for XCOM’s future? 2K isn’t sharing sales figures for XCOM: Enemy Unknown or Enemy Within, or how sales broke down across the PC and console versions, so it’s impossible to say for sure. However, using publicly available Steam data, third-party site SteamSpy unofficially estimates 2.6 million PC copies sold since October of 2012. (That figure does factor in numerous deep Steam sales where it’s sold for as little as five dollars, and its inclusion in HumbleBundles.) Reliable console version sales numbers are difficult to come by, though based on failing to chart in the NPD top 10 retail games for October 2012 , it’s safe to speculate that console audiences didn’t flock to XCOM.Meanwhile, XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s popularity has endured on Steam. It’s maintained a spot in the Top 100 Steam games ever since day one, initially peaking at 70,000 concurrent players, and still averages between 3,000 and 4,000 peak concurrent players more than 18 months after its Enemy Within expansion came out. (Note: Steam’s peak concurrent players figure is the number of people playing simultaneously; daily total player numbers would be considerably higher, but are not publicly available.) Redirecting the resources that would’ve been necessary to release XCOM 2 on multiple platforms toward making the PC version better and more replayable makes a certain amount of sense – especially if Firaxis can turn XCOM into a game that rivals Civilization in bang-for-the-buck longevity.Of course, the one thing that a console version of XCOM 2 wouldn’t be able to handle at all is modding, which Solomon and DeAngelis consider to be one of it’s biggest features and key to offering the kind of long-term replayablity and value people have come to expect from the makers of Sid Meier’s Civilization. We’ll have more on how Firaxis is embracing modders in XCOM 2 next week.

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear all about how awesome gaming is, plus a healthy dose of random Simpsons references.