More accurately, PC gaming would've never had a drought if a $300 console wasn't capable of running the exact same games with slightly lower graphics settings that most $1,000 PCs had trouble keeping up with.  In no other generation prior to this one were console games even close to the tech curve that PC games were constantly riding the edge of.

Sure, consoles like PS1 and N64 received the occasional port of popular PC games like Diablo and StarCraft, albeit severely scaled back in both the graphics and gameplay departments, but there was never a time where flagship PC titles were not only releasing simultaneously on consoles day 1, but looked and played nearly 100% identical to each other.

PC gaming had the exclusives because consoles couldn't handle it back in the day. Sony threatened PC gaming by showing that they could up the tech at a mass market price and increase the marketshare. Before Sony it was just Nintendo running the console realm and PC gaming looking down laughing at all participants involved. Microsoft wanted to partner with Sony pissed their pants when Sony turned them down, joined the PC market to "Save it" from Sony while taking everything thats good about PC gaming (save for the RTS and MMO titles) with them to battle. PC gaming has always been superior. it all correlates, the fall of Japanese development, the unexplainable rise of western development and drought of PC gaming because they shared multiplats with consoles and eventually the rise of Steam, which brought PC gaming back. PC is great because it gives a lot of companies their start and its a very personal way to start up with gamers. Warframe was one of those games, built on the back of the consumer and now its settling into consoles. Based on my point that I made with Sony beforehand when they grew their marketshare and threatened PC gaming, this is the same thing the cheaper pricing of consoles keeps a barrier for the majority of people to invest into a gaming PC. For those who console game and want to upgrade more power to them, but it will be a minority.

Yeah, sure the N64 got quake and Unreal and some others, a couple of PC games, but console gaming has caught the focus of people who primarily want to make games for it. No nobody was really saying very much about it back then, but today its just everywhere. It didn't make up the mass of Nintendo or the Playstations game list. The PS2 and Xbox wera sent a message and the RPG's on the Xbox from the west were all PC made and top notch. Thats when Bioware became my favorite RPG developer and I was all JRPG back then.

I bought/built mine for about $500 last year and it has already made up for itself with the insane Steam deals. And it's about as capable as a PS4. Playing multiplats on PC is fantastic and is probably quite a bit cheaper in the long run (I mean hell, just looking now on Steam they have a game like Metro Last light for $20 when it's $50 on consoles), plus you get PC exclusives too! If you can afford a PS4 you can definitely afford a capable rig. I definitely recommend it as a long-term investment.

Consoles are never going to make PC gaming obsolete, not the way things are set up now.

There are some things that PC is just far and away superior at. RTS, for example, or really any game with a lot of multi-tasking or complex movement. Or play WoW, where you've got dozens of skills and items you need to map to your keyboard because you use them all. You can't play WoW on a controller at a high level, it's impossible.

On top of that are mods. Any game that supports them is automatically superior on a PC. A Bethesda game on a console is just a shell of itself, in my opinion.

Perhaps most importantly, you have competition. Digital distributors are fighting one another and the customer wins. They have cheap sales just to lure you to their games portal. With the console services, you're a captive audience already. It's true that I'm not a big fan of Steam and think it's highly overrated, but I certainly don't have to buy from there (even if games from Amazon or GoG often use Steam).

Really, PC gaming is so cheap now. It's so different from when you had to have a $1000 system to even think of playing games. Now you can play quite happily on a system at half that price.

One of the more interesting things I've noticed over the last few years, as the doors to gaming on a PC have opened up to more people, is that the current crop of PC gamers, rather than being "elitist" as in the past, are now often more open minded about things like digital distribution and playing games from smaller developers with a lot less prejudice. Most of the "indie haters" seem to be console-centric.

Love it when you talk dirty. 

The lovin' doesn't stop until it puts the lotion on the skin. 

P.S.

Enjoy your PC gaming. I'm settling back into it as well.

Don't you have (And thus pay) to have PS+ for basic functionality such as voice chat and Multiplayer on the PS4? (I.E. Included in the PS+ price.)

Besides, whatever features that Steam doesn't have you can get for free via 3rd parties, feel free to name them.

Lets face it, no one in the gaming business beats the Steam sales. (Except Amazon which will attempt to price match), add the daily sales, mid-week sales, weekend sales and Humble Bundle packs that will activate on Steam... Sony and Microsoft actually downright looks like thieves in comparison.

Then you have Steam greenlight so you can vote for games you want available, take in-game photos and video and share them with other players (Can't do that on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3!), voice chat, Steam workshop for mods and other content, big picture mode for those who love to game on a TV and use a controller, offline mode, free games, free-game-weekends, free game beta's, automagic patching, massively improved graphics and sound to the point where it's simply no comparison.
Next Generation console games will still pale in comparison to my own PC graphically. :)

There is roughly 85 games free to play/own on Steam, sure some are downright crap, but that's a given even on the Xbox and Playstation, there are some *excellent* games in it however.
Then you have mods. Oh the mods, entirely new game franches have become big because of that, like Dota 2 or League of Legends, some of the worlds most actively played games based on a WarCraft 3 map with 12 million+ players a day.

Left 4 Dead and DayZ started as mods, mods can completely change games such as Skyrim so they're a million times better with better graphics, new campaigns, you name it.

Lets face it, Playstation Network was great when you didn't have to pay for basic functionality such as Multi-player gaming (I blame Microsoft for setting the precedent.) but this next generation is just poor form.

The price of next generation is pretty high too, I can pick up a Core 2 Quad Q6600 second hand machine, granted it would be about 6 years old now... For roughly $150, Drop in 8Gb of ram and a Radeon 7950 and a new Powersupply for about $550 - $600 total, overclock the Core 2 Quad to around 3.6ghz and you have a system about the same Price as a Playstation 4 here in Australia.
You have a superior, cheaper syetem. (Both initially and massively over the long term.)
The other bonus to it is, you're not restricted to only what Microsoft and Sony says you can do.

The PC Gaming market made $20 billion in 2012. The whole gaming industry, including mobile games, made $63 billions (source: yahoo/reuters). A "dying" platform that represents about 1/3 of the total market can't be called doomed, don't you think?

PC may not have as many exclusives or dedicated games as consoles do, but if you compare PC with each console individually (the PS3 or Xbox360 or Wii exclusives), the situation is not that bad.

it makes sense, its the end of a generation of game consoles, and the quality of something that has half of the effects as the pc and 10 times the jagged pixels lines than its pc counterpart. plus the pc version is usually $10 or so cheaper unless its a big name release.