This is fucking retarded.
The current $60 AAA price range was created by the consoles since the console manufacturers were selling their hardware at a loss and needed to recoup those losses by raising the price of the titles. If anything, console titles will have their prices increased in the next generation due to development costs, and PC gamers will be stuck with higher priced games again because of this.
Also, who says it's cheaper to make games for consoles? Console development kits are vastly more expensive, which is why all the new and small development companies make PC games exclusively.
Hell, raise the prices and launch date sales on the PC will plummet further as people will wait for the Steam bargain bin or resort to piracy.
As for those idiots sprouting 'Piracy is killing off PC gaming', I'm just going to go quote myself...
Ummm, Crysis and FarCry sold 3 million+ copies each on the PC. BF2 sold 6 million+ on all platforms, around 4 million of which were on the PC. Half Life 2 was leaked like Crysis, and yet it outsold Halo:CE. SC2 hit 3 million sales in its first month. Piracy is rampant, but that didn't stop Steam from racking nearly a billion dollars last year. Note, nearly every single franchise has set itself up on the PC, and after they gained enough revenue, they started working on console development kits - which are damn expensive, and the chief reason why small developers usually make PC exclusives only. Piracy has not stopped games like STALKER, Metro and The Witcher sell millions of copies and warrant sequels. These developers didn't even spend money on large ad campaigns, and gained popularity through word of mouth.
If it's a good PC oriented game, it will sell well.
Fact is, making multi-platform titles is an economically sound decision. What I'm trying to point out is that the PC market is not a niche market, and makes up a large portion of overall gamers. So devs should actually give a shit and develop the PC titles alongside the consoles with the same priority.
And just so you know, the used game sales market is starting to sting. GameStop raked over $2 billion last year selling used games, none of which went to the devs. Couple that with the millions of players being banned from XBL for modding their XBoxes and running boot-legged copies of games, not to mention Sony going after all those people using GeoHot's firmware hack and thus being able to run pirated games, while console games are being constantly leaked before their release dates on P2P sites (just look at the last two Halo titles)... I would say console gamers are catching up with us. Still far behind, but catching up...
Does that mean devs should sell sub-par products to those console gamers who bought the games, ignoring the millions of sales in revenue?
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