OK so as a gentleman I've decided to leave the circle jerk alone and start another thread instead to offer more substantiated views.
The PC platform was my favorite some ten years ago. I loved it more than all the console systems combined, they could well disappear and I would've barely been affected. It seemed that there were about 20-25 high quality original exclusives that were released each year like Grim Fandango, Anachronox, Half-Life and Gabriel Knight 3. I browsed PC gaming sites and read PC Gamer almost maniacally, it was all I could worry about.
But then we all know what happened. A generation of console systems with a higher default resolution and decent GPUs made this enormous market impossible to ignore. You can see that with games like Deus Ex 2, franchises that used to be the apanage of PCs were sabotaged so that a console port could also be made.
It's risky to buy a graphics card now because if it's too inexpensive it will not last long, and most of the top-range one that are really worth a damn cost 400$ and more easily. This really scares a lot of people away, especially when consoles offer such decent 3D rendering abilities at such a low price.
But it's not the problem, as my PC can easily run any current game on the market at a very good framerate. No, the problem is that the remaining PC game genres blow, and the overall quality of games isn't that great.
It's easy to see that editors generally give their bigger budgets and their best teams for console games. I really can't believe the amount of major PC exclusive stuff that is made by obscure studios from Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia. These are the ones that deal with really major franchises. That should easily tell you what is the focus of the biggest development houses from the most advanced parts of Europe and North America.
Some people like MMORPGs, some like RTS'es, and games with a Tolkien universe... but some others do not like them anymore, or never liked them at all. Problem is, this is all that PC gaming really has to offer anymore.
RTS'es control better with a mouse and a keyboard, but we have a right to be fed up of these games, don't we? It's not that great to constantly wait for units to move at the other side of the screen at snail-like speeds, micro-manage 10-15 different things at the same time, and wait 15-20 minutes before something really happens in a mission for hours on end. I tried Command & Conquer 3 and Supreme Commander at the beginning of the year and these seemed interesting, but more than 12 years after the original C&C I simply wasn't ready to deal with these games' irritating aspects anymore.
The avalanche of bugs and configuration woes that frequently comes with the PC gaming experience doesn't bother me at all, but other things do.
I don't like being confined to a small PC monitor after having experienced what it's like to have an enormous HDTV. The controllers for console systems keep on getting more and more ergonomic, precise and comfortable, and I am fed up to deal with complex keyboard control schemes, and to constantly point and click-click-click-click-click-click to no end.
I tried many, many of them, and the only PC-exclusive in recent memory that I really loved is Neverwinter Nights 2. At this point the situation won't ever go back to the golden era of the late nineties. I'm ready to try any apparently good PC exclusive if one ever shows up, but it seems more rational to accept this phase of bereavement instead.
