Sheamus has an interesting spin, and of course the development of decent gpus for consoles has helped that market take a chunk out of the pc gaming industry, especially since some high-profile pc games seemed to require a very high-end system: Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights, Crysis, Bioshock, etc. The first two were developed pre-Vista, and just as multicore processors were coming onto the market, and Oblivion was so high-end that some reviewers said that the machine that could play it at full settings had yet to be developed. The Xbox360 had just come out, and for players interested in Oblivion, the choice was to 1) put up with a laggy pc game, 2) spend money on an XBox360, or 3) get a new pc with a high end graphics card that would cost twice as much as the 360. Option 2 was the better one for a lot of consumers.
However, high profile games like these help perpetuate the myth that gaming pcs need to be several thousands of dollars, or involve yearly upgrades that each would cost the same amount as a console. This simply isn't true, unless you want to buy one of those special gaming pcs reviewed by PC Gamer or other hardware sites. And how many of those are rated as "must buy or be forever labeled 'n00b 4 life'? For $800-$1000, you can buy/build a machine that will play just about any game you throw at it--at least for three years. That isn't a bad life. Both pcs and consoles each have about 3 years of life. Microsoft is getting ready for the next generation of console, about 3 years after the release of the 360. For pcs, new releases of operating systems and software that makes use of cpu/gpu technology upgrades will drive us to get new pcs about every 3-4 years. Since we're spending the money upgrading our pcs anyway, we'll spend just a bit more to ensure that we're getting something that will play games, too. My current pc cost me about $1000 to build, and I can play any game on the market right now. But I also use my pc for other purposes than for gaming, so it's cost effective to have a machine that can game AND do other work. I'm not spending as much as I would for a pc + console.
However, consoles do have a cost edge when it comes to family gaming and the portable market. If you like to pass along your older pc to your children for their homework, then you'll probably want a console for family entertainment. If you tend to use a notebook, then it makes sense to game on a console since gaming notebooks tend to be quite expensive.
Still, the myth that pc gaming is geared toward the high-end persists, as we can see here:
Timje said:
I think to save PC gaming people developers need to stop developing for gaming rigs, and start developing for out-of-the-box Intel home PCs.
Here is where I believe that Valve's Steam has real potential to change things. Valve's Monthly Hardware Survey [http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey] can show over time the rate that consumers adopt new technologies in OS, graphics, and cpus. As a result, the survey can serve as a gauge for software developers to write games for the software that will be the new mainstream by the time the game hits the market. Games can look good yet still be playable on mainstream machines.
However, I don't see the pc gaming market surging back to where it was in 1998, but I do see it as evolving. I've played both console and pc, and I simply prefer the pc. I like the configurability of the controls and flexibility of input. However, if I had children, I'd likely have a console. Kids can be hard on computers, so I'd rather have to replace a new controller because it was dropped than to replace key pc components.
