Are Consoles holding back Game Development?

Depends on how you are talking about holding back development.

Because of ease of access, consoles have helped push gaming to its largest scale its ever been, thanks to lowest common denominator type sales, and restrictions built around making games easier to pop out like candy.

On the flip side, quality has gone down so more dedicated gamers who want deep experiences and intricate gameplay dont enjoy it as much because those things are hard to produce en masse.

Consoles themselves are only physically restricting hardware advancements. Everything else is based on what consumers want. Game developers are running companies, not charities. They need money and put their development to where the money goes. Its the people who are wanting cheap bland experiences that are holding back gaming, not a platform. People who dont have the time or desire to wrap themselves in a game dont want to have to, so cheaper less engaging experiences are needed to keep these people happy, and their money flowing into the pockets of people whose profession is to make video games.

I would say no for one they have to make money some how and with the way shit is going with the PS4 it doesn't look like there getting held back. Also console is what makes gamer makers money. They lose money when they come out with a pc game and they have said this that is why pc almost always gets the game last because of so many people just downloading it.

Falling for the old piracy kills sales gambit eh?

See my above point, but PC gets second hand for reasons other than piracy, but nobody wants to admit it, because piracy is the easy way to be lazy. Like blaming video games for school shootings instead of actually admitting they were bad people.

Nobody is losing money with PC games. Sales appear to be low because no sales statistic can account for sales on steam, or most D2D sales in the first place. Physical copy sales have dropped, but PC gamers are still buying and playing games on the same level console players are.

I have all of those on my PC. / Emulators FTW.

Except I have never had a problem with one, and many of them come with recording features, and the ability to up the graphics. I run all my ps2 games at 4x the native resolution, and get faster load/save times.