Jereel, seriously though. Piracy has always been a problem. You have zero proof or even fundamental data required to make your assertation that PC sales have declined because of piracy. What really happened, is consoles just became BIGGER than PC gaming. Due to the "stable" platform, it also became more focused, and due to the vested interests of the platform makers - giantts of industry all, much more heavily marketed.
Does piracy have an effect? Sure. But so what? It is not a doom and gloom effect, and it is an effect that has been present ever since the dawn of PC gaming. There used to be BBSes by the truckload that had pirated games, people used to swap disks at school, hell most people back in "ancient times" had libraries full of illegal games. Kids with no money didnt pay for games 15 years ago any more than kids with no money pay for them today. The only difference is now the main hub is centralized via torrents that are accessed internationally, where some jackass from a company that makes tens of millions selling anti-piracy software (that doesnt work) can look at the the tracker data and cook up a scary sounding number that gets clueless suits to fork over a few million more for their new product that still wont work.
PC gaming would certainly have some degree of new sales if piracy did not exist, but piracy has not appreciably grown as a % of PC gaming, if anything shrunk drastically in the states... it is not depriving companies that make solid products of large profits on the PC platform , it is not preventing new indy dev houses from being successful, it is not preventing large corps who put out good products from being successful.... and it is not worth the insane amount of debate, time, effort, money, etc spent on the subject.
There are way to many tangents here for me to address them all individually but, I will cherry pick one :
""This statement can only be considered deeply subjective, or downright false. Early gaming consoles are why we have PC games today.This is a false statement, in the extreme and shows how little you know of the early days and evolution of gaming. Not trying to be insulting, but it is the plain truth. Early PC gaming is why we have consoles, not the other way around.
And to think that consoles are inferior for gaming is to assume that everyone prefers a mouse and keyboard to a controller (true) , a more expensive peice of equiment for equivalent graphics (not relevant, PC hardware is better but underutilized due to console porting... but sometimes shines through on a good engine ( see GTA4)... or a game that had to much going on a lagged console(see Last Remnant), and a relatively small monitor instead of a TV. (erm, where did you get this from? I personally have a dual monitor setup, with one being a 32" Sony Bravia XBR and I game on it in 1080p.... and have my PS3 in a seperate HDMI. This is pretty common now.)""
