Xelloss on 11 February 2010
The thing that "saved" PC gaming was the current generation of hardware reaching a saturation point. Something that so many people fail to realize is that PC hardware has "generations" just as consoles do, but instead of being a one-piece package like a console, it is split across several components and often sees a staggered release of incremental upgrades.
The PC era prior to 8800GT/C2D era had been fairly hardware stagnant, plagued with to many iterations of relatively overpriced hardware combined with OS transition... making for a fairly unpleasant gaming environment all things considered, especially when the performance wasnt that much superior compared to consoles. Whereas consoles had succeeded with the current gen, of encroaching into the PC stronghold of online gaming.
Fast forward 2 years after the introduction of the 8800 class GPU and equivalent, and you see high market penetration of PC systems that boast at least a C2D/8800 or equivalent, or better with at least 3GB ram. You also have a lot of driver issues worked out across various OSes.
This is an important milestone, because a C2D/8800+ PC is superior in performance to any home console, ergo anyone who has a PC configuration at least this good can purchase more or less any game on the shelf with confidence that the GFX and performace will not suck.
It has amazed me for years how people toss out all these silly theories on why PC games are or are not selling.
The bottom line is, just as with consoles, the 3 key factors in overall software sales are install base, install base and install base. PC once again has a current gen install base worth a damn, PC software sales are also once again worth a damn.
