I honestly don't think the PC gaming market will ever die. It's not as big as it was and consoles are clearly the market leaders, but even if all the major developers suddenly abandoned the PC as a platform overnight it would just lead to an explosion of independent development houses.

That might not actually be a bad thing. Imagine the creativity of all the small dev houses of the 90s like Bullfrog, with today's computing power at their disposal.

Anyway, I never got the appeal of consoles, except for social gaming. Beers n' Mario Kart.

Elitism much?

It's not like PCs are confined to the elite. People just inexplicably decide to use inferior consoles. Marketing, I suppose.

They are easier to buy, use and maintain. Convenience is a pretty big motivator for many people.

Yep. Like I said, I think that effort is the biggest barrier for a lot of people. With consoles you just plug everything in and go...with PCs there's planning and configuration involved. It's a lot more to deal with. There's a payoff if you're interested in what the platform has to offer, but it's up to the individual to decide if the effort is worth it to them or not. There's nothing wrong with deciding one way or the other. :shrug:

It's too bad such discussions often end in rudeness and jabs, though.

It takes skills to use PC.

Wrong.
No water-cooling ever yet and most of the systems I've built (all for about $1000 each time) have gone 4+ years (some closer to six) where the only thing I've replaced is the video card ... once. And even that I didn't always have to change to play the current games, sometimes I chose to because I just wanted a new gizmo. I'm a geek like that. One time in 15+ years I had to buy a GPU twice, because it actually broke. Half my GPU's and CPU's/RAM/other parts are still used by my husband in some crap 'testing' pc's he likes to have around.

And yes, I use my PC's every day, they're on almost 24/7. When I build a new one, I keep the old one, so I always have 2 cycling. Like now, the older one is using XP for older games/programs and the 'fancy one' is Win7/current games (I built it 3 yrs ago).

Now, I'm not going to say it's not more expensive than buying a console. It is. And consoles have PC's beat on ease of use, yup. If your income is very sparse, buying a cheaper non-gaming laptop for school/internet etc. plus a console is likely more affordable & flexible. But this whole myth that you're always replacing parts & that keeping up PC's to run games costs some kind of mini-fortune is a fallacy. Occasionally it may happen that multiple things break not far apart, but that's bad luck, which can happen to anyone (including console users), not the norm.

Edit: The current hard drive "crisis", however, may change things for that particular item. SSD's are still very pricey, relatively speaking, and depending on how things go with the rebuilding or whatever of that industry, quality of HDD's could be hit or miss more often for a while, plus price and availability.

Not much. I'm not an advanced PC user, I still understand how to install programs, modify games and crap like that. It's not that hard and barely demands any technical skill at all. Meshes go to meshes, textures go to textures. That's not a skill.

Someone already stated its easier to setup and run a console compared to a PC so thats a major selling point there.
Marketing is also a factor, yeah, since to market an xbox is as simple as just saying "Xbox" but PCs because of their setups, config and specific builds need more advertisemant and I'm sure lots of people prefer to build their own rigs rather than buy a ready-made set up, which might cost more IDK, so marketing each part of the machine would be a pain since they are constantly being upgraded.
for more.

Not really...

For me personally, it is entirely about game selection.

I own an Xbox 360, and a PC. I play both frequently, and they're both very awesome. My PC is even LESS powerful than my 360, but that hasn't stopped me from enjoying it at all.

In fact, my PC see's a lot of use due to indie games, and this is where I usually spend my PC gaming budget. Titles like Minecraft and Mount and Blade are awesome, games like these make me want to build a PC. But then I look at all the big titles coming out, and I don't really see anything that gets my attention. I love playing Indie games, and older games too like Fallout and Baldurs Gate, but for the mean time I'm not going to put effort into building a rig when I don't even know if I'll enjoy it.

Sure, I'll get all the awesome new fancy DX 11 effects, but I honestly couldn't care less about graphics. I haven't seen a game that looks "bad" since, what, 2004? I guess I have a lower graphical standard than a lot you folks. The only thing that about Console gaming that irks me is the lack of mods for Skyrim. I can mod Oblivion and Morrowind on my crappy old laptop just fine. There are a few awesome PC titles that I just can't miss, but luckily they aren't very resource heavy, so I can play them on my old laptop.

In short, PC gaming is awesome, I just don't see any big titles that hold my attention, so I don't want to invest any money in it.

I think Bethesda was aiming to sell to folks that don't own $400.00 CPU's and $500.00 video cards on top of a $200.00 motherboard. The term of the day is Scalability.

The problem is that Skyrim doesn't even utilize the capabilities of a $200 CPU and a $250 GPU. :confused:

Fantastic! I and many other have $110.00 CPU's and $130.00 GPU's.

That's my point. People with lower specs are fine, but it doesn't scale for higher specs.

Quite frankly, it looks almost identical to the console version no matter how good your hardware is.

That will leave you more headroom for graphically demanding mods.

Like it or not the money is in the console version and until that changes there will be few developers that develop for the PC first. One market the console has not taken over yet is the MMO market, so games there are still developed for the PC like Bioware's soon to be released Star Wars The old Republic. However in that market the developer is hindered by the fact that they need their game to be playable even on older PC's so once again the "high end" PC is not the focus of the developer as is evident in TOR. Not saying I don't like the graphics in TOR, in fact I really like them, but they don't use direct x 11 or even 10, TOR uses direct x 9c because they need it to run on older systems.