Who are you referring to?
Me for bringing up Steam’s sales and the market report as yet another data point to counter the mainstream view of PC as a “dying platform”?
Or the likes of Cubsfan, who continues to cling to his delusional fantasy cause he hates the PC?
Good grief. Folks, can’t we all just get along? Video games = fun. That should be something we can all agree on. Besides, the whole PC/console distinction is meaningless anyway. I can hook up my PC to my television, my xbox 360 to my computer monitor, play most new mainstream games on both platforms … really, a console is just a dedicated, low-end gaming PC.
I’m referring to anyone. I just don’t understand the passion, that’s all. These aren’t family members; it’s like arguing which brand of paper towel is best.
I agree. But take a looksee through most mainstream gaming sites, youtube channels, and Cubsfan related posts.
The way you and I see things is not what average Joe gamer thinks. And I love to point out when Average Joe well… anything gets something wrong.
Isn’t that what this board is about?
Also, yet another hijack:
I just got some steam bucks for my b-day and I realized I have a couple of extra games (and I’m looking at a bundle right now so I might have one or two other extras). Anyone want a copy of Half-Life 2 or The remake of monkey island?
Maybe I should start another thread for Steam gimmes…
Hey, if you’re really set on finding that copy of Half-Life 2 a good home, I think I could make sure that it’s fed, watered, and walked several times a day. 
PM me your steam name 
To be fair, it’s not my preferred choice of gaming platform. Hell, after Minecraft finishes up and becomes a legit game, I’d buy it if it came out for the Xbox and play it there instead of the PC.
I bought the first Railworks and got the second free. I’ll fire it up when I get a chance and report.
To be honest I don’t think that any current console has the RAM to really handle minecraft with the way he’s doing the world loading. It’s scary how much memory such a little simple game takes up.
Done! Danke. 
To be honest, I don’t think 1 billion dollars revenue is that impressive. PC gaming is a niche and Steam among other things ensures it will continue to thrive as a niche. However compared to ten years ago PC gaming is clearly not at the heart of the gaming industry and I doubt it will ever regain that position. Of course so long as good games continue to be made for the PC it probably doesn’t matter too much.
I think, though, that’s obfuscating the reality of the situation: The only universe in which the PC is “niche” is the artificial one in which A) MMOs don’t count, and B) all consoles are lumped together. If you look at it in a rational way, all the various gaming platforms (PC, XBox, PS3, etc) are within about an order of magnitude of each other, and nothing’s really “niche” so much as “we exist in a fragmented market”.
What Zeriel said.
And, did you even bother to look at the US gaming market report I linked to Lantern? Doesn’t sound like it.
You’re ignoring that the issue isn’t that the PC doesn’t get games; the issue is that those games are often awful console ports that do nothing to utilize the advantages of the platform. They’re lousy console ports because the Xbox and PS3 are similar enough from a design point perspective that you can lump them together safely. The problem is that classic PC gameplay is dying off, which is also why no one considers WoW when talking about PC gaming. I’m getting ready to drop $2300 on a new PC here, so I certainly don’t think that PC gaming is dead or dying. It’s hard to deny that the power dynamic is changing when you load up a PC game and its error message tells you to reconnect to Xbox Live or system reqs haven’t change for four years. There was a time when no one asked what platform to buy a game on, since it wasn’t a question. Now, not only do people ask, but the answer isn’t always clear.
I do think that consoles have had a mostly negative impact on the games we have on PC, but even so we do still get some of the perks of platform.
We might not get the great graphics we should be getting very often, for example, but we still do get them some times. Most multi-plats come with special DX 10, DX 11, and Physics improvements/features. Take a look at crysis 2. The devs have said that they have purposefully only shown the PC running at console settings because they don’t want to overshadow it with the graphical goodness that will be the PC version.
We still get a lot of unique indie games as well, there still plenty of sims, and the strategy genre is still very popular.
Just look at games like Shogun 2 Total War. 65,000 units on the battlefield! A console would explode trying to run this game, nevermind the fact that average console gamer x hears “You can use real world tactics” and immediately falls asleep.
Battlefield 3 will feature larger 64 player maps and dedicated servers, and all types of games still benefit from mods on our platform.
So the PC I think still caters to uniquely PC gamer pallets. Almost certainly less than before, but as every projection so far points out, the PC gaming market is growing. I wouldn’t be surprised if developers can continue to make a living targeting multi-faceted tastes of the PC gaming crowd.
I’m noticing less of the Live for Windows integration as companies realize how abysmal it is.
As for the lumping together, I assume you’re only talking about maximum res/fill rate/etc and not the ease of porting, and yeah that’s a concern.
I think we might be seeing PC gaming back out of the slump soon. I was afraid the PC was dying as a platform in the late 90’s and early 00’s when niche genres started disappearing (arcade-style flight sim, RTS, WRPG) or sucking balls in favor of yet another FPS. But in the last few years we’ve had HAWX, a stunning few RTSes (I’m thinking Supreme Commander more than Starcraft II), and the revival of Fallout and Bioware’s latest few epics.
Speaking as a guy with a $1700 gaming PC and a Wii/DS for my wife, I’m not worried about my choice of platforms, even if I have to “settle” for 1080p most of the time.
It’s an adolescent in group/out group thing. You have one system (either because you chose it, or because it’s the one your family bought you), so you rag on all the others because a) it justifies you having your system, thus your own self if you define yourself by what gaming system you play and b) it creates tension, which solidifies the in-group around you as the group tightens against its “enemies”.
You’ll find the same animosity amongst teenage “gangstas” arguing about which rap is best, goths & metalheads, surfers and skaters, nerds and jocks… Basically it’s about insecurity, self-validation and social life.
It’s also complete bullshit, but they’re too young to realize that (and I say this as a guy who was a rabid SNES fan). FWIW, the manufacturers themselves play it up to the nines as well - they know their public.
ETA: that said, I have to agree with **Palooka **there - these days many good PC games are just console ports, that is to say games that were designed to take advantage of console peripherals, mediums and even narrative tropes ; that are just copy/pasted as is to the PC. Which is a shame, when PCs can do so much more. We’re the home of the 999 ctrl+shift keybinds, goddammit !
This right here, folks.
If people have computers, people will want computer games, end of story. That will always be true, forever and ever, amen.
Consoles might well become more popular to be sure, but there will be PC games for as long as there are PCs.
Every time this dumb thread comes around, someone says that PC gaming isn’t dying because the PC will always have games and that it’s just the nature of those games that is changing. The entire point of the “It’s dying” crowd is that the nature of the games is changing and doing so for the worse. That’s what people are objecting to. No one cares if PC gaming brings in $200 billion in Zynga games if Battlefield 4 is a PS4 exclusive. The fear is that because of low sales, the PC platform won’t be able to sustain its development costs, so only lousy bit-sized games are released. You can see the same thing in the smartphone market due to people being unwilling to pay more than $5 for a game.
If something is blue it is, by definition, not round. That makes as much sense as your post.
If something is mainly popular with only a small crowd with particular tastes it is niche. If something was very popular with a broad audience and is no longer close to as popular except with smaller more particular crowds it is niche and also dying.