PC gaming's death knell has been sounded prematurely for years now, and finally we're at the point where some of the basic points in that lament aren't true.
I've been messing around with Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies lately. It has
a lot of bad points, but some of the modes are genuinely fun (at least the first time through) - and it's basically a slightly souped-up 1998 engine game that could run on your microwave. Other huge online games, like TF2 and DOTA, do not require a PC that's very expensive. From a personal point of view, I'm surprised how little the annoying online players actually do impact the game enjoyment. Seriously, kids can't bother me anymore. Bad players (of various types) are still there and still a major problem, but I think I've gotten better at filtering them out. In some respects, I'd prefer more limited user controls to prevent some chances for grief - which I guess is a strategy out of the console playbook. But here we are - times change.
Console manufacturers have to execute tighter choreography to price consoles these days and to convince people that they are a good purchase. Components are much more expensive - this was well-known sometime during the previous generation, when those systems were sold at a massive per-unit loss. Today, the console manufacturers are not willing to engage in such an arms race, so they have just taken advantage of the intervening years' technology to make the new systems smaller, quieter, cooler, and cheaper - but the new systems aren't nearly as close to the bleeding edge as the 360 and PS3 were. Nor is the sticker price as good, and the failure rates? That's not exactly a pressing issue for PC gamers either, so improving over terrible still isn't a win for consoles. nVidia recently went on record saying that consoles no longer have parity with PCs - and that gap is going to widen for at least a while. No doubt nVidia is emboldened to say this because
nVidia isn't in the current consoles - but the reason they aren't there is still telling. AMD is in dire straits right now so their moves don't represent the industry's future direction.
Consoles might still have a better future than AMD, which appears headed for selling low-cost bargain parts and eventual bankruptcy given that they no longer compete in research and development expenses in either of the traditional markets they are involved in. Current console manufacturers Microsoft and Sony might not have a much better future, given that neither of them have the technology in-house - unlike years ago when margins weren't so thin, and Sony had competitive-enough CPU designs and manufacturing anyway, it isn't the case that unique software support determines the direction of the market. Instead, the various players look for the best value proposition to consumers. Increasingly, there's very little that consoles offer that PCs cannot.
There are many reasons - some based on the experience of the last generation, but some still true - that the value of consoles isn't clear to buyers. Will it support new technology? How long will I be stuck with the hardware after it's obsolete? How long will they support it, anyway? Will it be too hot or have teething problems? On the PC side, as nVidia states, the gap in performance is widening so that the various trade-offs in a console - the margins the console makers expect, the form factor sacrifices - give even new cheap PC systems the ability to perform better. And things only get better when you consider that many people already have some kind of PC. Even the smallest form factor of PCs - like the thin mini-ITX - are becoming more competitive with consoles while having fewer tradeoffs.
Ultimately, consoles have to provide a better experience than the alternatives. It's easy to forget that what we call "consoles" are just one particular formulation of a business strategy, one which requires the manufacturers to do a lot of things that could be split up amongst other parties - and in fact they are. With the tools for designing cheap, console-format (i.e., basically console) systems being much more widespread than they were, and the reality of standardization in many of the necessary components, and software that doesn't need to follow the lead of a locked-in platform when there are many (more) open systems to sell on, it's easy to see that there are many things that could ruin the business plan of the current console manufacturers. In some key respects, the current generation is most certainly the result of this realization.
