Why doesn't every PC game allow you to use console commands?

"Games for Windows Live". It was the most obtuse form of DRM ever created. In games like GTA 4, your saves won't work unless you log in to GfWL, which has a tendency to just not work. Then it could randomly erase your saves, while, at the same time, it forbade you to back up those save files. Then Microsoft just dropped support on it (and even said they would shut down its authentication servers), so most games just stopped working over time. Luckily, most developers updated their games to get rid of it, like Dark Souls, Bioshock and Street Fighter 4. GTA 4 still uses it.

In conclusion, it was Microsoft's attempt to compete with Steam, except being a really shitty service. You can't imagine how much. This is a very brief summary on it:
www.howtogeek.com/244902/why-pc-gamers-hated-microsofts-games-for-windows-live/

By the way, Microsoft is trying again with their Windows store. It's marred by horrible problems again (for some reason it caps the framerate and has problems with v-sync, needs to be online all the time even in single-player games - they say they patched this, but I don't know if it was patched for every game -, forbids you to do anything with the game's files, forbids mod support, it only works with Windows 10...), so keep away from it. I wouldn't touch it even with a 10 foot pole.

I know this is rather late, but I'd just like to say that those are cheat codes, not console commands, considering the console ports use the exact same ones. That wiki page didn't list any codes that were exclusive to the PC release.


At any rate, I'm really disgusted that none of the PC ports of GTA games thus far have included console commands. San Andreas didn't have them, I know that for sure, and GTA 4 doesn't seem to either. It's an especially shitty situation in 4 since the cheat codes in said game are boring and underwhelming compared to San Andreas's. Sometimes I get the feeling that console commands were never used in these games at all to test the game's performance during development, which, if true, would explain why so many of them (especially GTA 4) are so poorly optimized in comparison to PC games like Half Life 2, but maybe that's a stretch.

Honestly in the case of a PC game like GTA 4 there's really no reason to go for the PC version over the console version due to the fact that it has virtually no/very few exclusive features and potentially runs even worse than the console version. It's just sad. I mean what's the point?