I don’t really think this is valid; If you’re willing to wait until all the games you want go on sale on Steam, you can wait until the console games you want go on sale too.
I can buy Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition for $13 on Amazon RIGHT NOW. That’s only $3 more than I paid for it during the “super mad crazy insane savings limited time only Steam sale” a couple of months ago. And that’s not even a “sale”; That’s just what the game COSTS now.
Steam is great for buying games that you’re not sure you want, but the fact of the matter is that for a lot of people it also leads to you buying a ton of games you don’t actually play (I still have at least half a dozen games acquired this summer that have never even been installed). Not really saving myself a lot of money there, no matter how good the bargains seemed at the time.
Are there some titles that are nichey enough that they don’t go down in price a whole lot? Sure. They’re also games that are nichey enough that I can’t buy them on Steam (or the PC at ALL) for any price, so they pretty much don’t deserve consideration in a “how much money am I saving” context.
I’d be very, VERY curious to see how much you -actually- saved on those 140 games. Because I have sincere doubts that it’s as much as you think it is. Especially if you were willing to purchase used physical media (and why not? It’s not like you’re losing anything, even if all you get is a disc, since your digital purchases don’t come with any ‘feelies’ either.).
Regarding Planetside 2: Well, I’m sure it’s a great technological feat, but get back to me when it has A) Actually come out and B) Actually made back its development costs. Because the first one wasn’t exactly what I’d call a runaway success. And if B never happens, it won’t be because it was “held back by consoles”. But it might well be because developing games that use all this cutting edge stuff is just too damn expensive, even now.
The only “revolution” we ever get when there’s a new generation of consoles is a revolution in how much it costs to develop for them (As in, it goes way the hell up) - I’ve never, EVER heard anyone say anything to support Kinthalis’ claims that “squeezing a lot of detail out of outdated hardware” costs more money. It’s actually the reverse - the longer a console has been out, the more tools there are and the more expertise there is in terms of methods and the like, plus, all the code for a lot of this stuff has already been written. It gets -cheaper- to make games as the console generation gets longer, not the reverse.
It just so happens that in fact, at the end of the day the actual price of the platform, including a gaming library, isn’t too far off from a console, despite insistence that it is from people who don’t know better.