You know, at first I was very frightened by this post, but I feel a little better now that I've read some of the thread. It did inspire me to find something useful to do with my computer besides buying more junk to plug into it though. I would say that one big point for the original poster is pretty simple....go into media play or best buy or wherever you buy games, and the pc section is so small!! Not just because they went to smaller boxes either. I can remember when there were stores that sold only pc games, and there were so many in media play they had them set up by category in 3 or 4 big aisles. Where I live, there are no stores that sell only pc games like they used to, all of them now sell mainly console stuff along with a shelf or two with pc games on them. Now there's like one aisle of games in best buy or whatever big chain i do in to, and half the games are gold versions or old ones.
Most people I know who play pc games just buy some expensive gaming system from dell. They don't want to open it or deal with anything more complicated than downloading new drivers, and when they bring out the xbox and ps3, if they have good strategy games and keyboard controls, I doubt they will spend 2k on a computer again after that, since it'll do everything a comp can do.
Another thing I just remembered is that there used to be tons of games you could only play on pc. I guess that's still the case now, but it has definitely been less and less so as time has gone on, and I bet it will basically disappear fairly soon. I mean, if you made games, you would make them to work on the consoles first and foremost and then add in pc support, because otherwise they're not going to make any money. I mean, you could make games for pc's with tons of different hardware you have to deal with, requiring all sorts of customer, tech support, driver x or y doesn't work, you have to fix it yada yada yada...and testing to get everything ironed out--and fewer people will buy your game. It costs more to make and you can sell less??? Nobody wants to do that, especially if these new consoles add all important keyboards. Then you make a game where you optimize it for one or two (ps3 and xbox) baseline hardware systems, it's easy to test, and there's no tech support or need to make patches b/c you can't fix it if it doesn't work anyway.
Before these, pc's were better b/c the screen res's were so much better (this one is huge), you had keyboard and mouse control, you had online games, and you had hard drives and saved games. These new consoles are a bigger leap than ever the old ones because they will have keyboards and mice presumably, as well as built in surround sound support, support on hd, online gaming, hard drives. This effectively eliminates all those huge advantages pcs have always had, where you could say, "but you can't play online" or "yeah but it looks like crap on the tv" or "yeah but i can hear enemies behind me" or "what's with all those freaking memory cards?" The old systems would leap ahead graphically, but never eliminate those factors. You won't be able to play with them like pc's....well, actually, you probably will be able to play with them like you can with xboxs (or so i hear). But even if you can't, 90 percent of the gamers in the world just want to play the game, not to be able to play with the machine that makes the games work, which is the only advantage left to pcs.
Just look at bungie (I believe that's who made halo). They started out making only mac games, like marathon. Then they made myth 1 2 and 3 for mac and pc (much to the chagrin of mac owners). Then they made halo for console, with the port to pc like a year later. That is the pattern that is going to be repeated everywhere. What about blizzard, isn't the starcraft commando game being designed for console? Sure eventually there'll be a port, but is blizz even working on anything else? The sims 3 will be made for console as well I imagine.
Plus on consoles you don't have to do so much troubleshooting. Tweaking the system is fun, but getting a new game and then figuring out why it won't run the way you want for an hour as you tweak each setting, download patch, make sure drivers are updated, make sure no software conflict, reinstall windows, buy a new hard drive, buy a new video card--ok maybe not the last ones. Oh and games take like 30 minutes to install now, what's up with that? If you want to play half life 2 on a fresh os you sit there and wait while changing cds and then when you're done you have to wait for it to decode the game??? Just putting a disk in and playing is pretty nice.
You know, now that I thought it through, I'm more afraid than ever. It may be more cost efficient to have a computer if you turn it into an htpc system and hook everything up to it. But even this, maybe not. The experience I had last night is similar to this whole discussion:
Experimenting with using my pc as a dvd player in lieu of getting a nicer one for my plasma tv or an upconverting one. Search around, read lots of posts, get ffdshow and finally realize I'll need to get zoomplayer, which I didn't realize had a trial version that would work. Dvd's don't play oh yay! Spend a long time finding codecs that are free and also will work. Ok get dvd playing and am able to tweak it with ffdshow, even though it's damn near impossible how to know what to do since it's free and therefore has no decent documentation or help of any kind whatsoever. Figure I'm ready to try it on my plasma spend a whole lot more time figuring out how to set up the resolutions and stuff on my comp to ensure it will work on the plasma and not harm it, waste a buncha time on this. When I do it, the screen doesn't even fit right, but I try the dvd anyway, can't figure out how I'm going to make the res's work right but skip that and play with ffdshow, it works but is making the imagine too shrunken, but the regular dvd software doesn't. Image improving some but not full screen, gamma is off and adjusting is difficult...........
And here is where I say to myself, because I don't really care about video editing (or burn dvds), why the hell am i doing all this? This is a gigantic pain in the ass! I can just buy an upconverting dvd player from best buy for 175 bucks, and if I don't like it I'll return it within 30 days and get all my money back or store credit or whatever. I can basically rent it. It will work right out of the box, it won't need codecs, and it will play any dvd I put into it. I can watch any dvd we have tonight upconverted right when I get home from the store and test it just like that. If it doesn't work I'll just mess with some settings or adjust the picture a bit and it will. It will do everything ffdshow will do 10 times easier (unless I learned how to use ffdshow really well...and even then it requires you to have a 1800 dollar computer as well!).
This is the attitude of almost everyone out there, besides people on forums like this, when it comes to games and consoles, and once you take away those advantages of pcs I mentioned....it may well be over.