OK I'll drop that point but see my edit, repeated here for convenience.

And if you concede that it looks like dogshit compared to other PC games then to maintain the comparison you have to assert that the new games on the console bought at the same time as the old PC ALSO look like "dogshit" (not just "not as good" but dogshit) compared to the new PC.

Well, perhaps I am.  I in general completely agree with this statemetn, that without a GPU upgrade, you cannot pay the same price as a console and run the same games for the same amount of time.

That said, if you add in $50 a year for Xbox Live gold, you're not really paying any more.  

I asked you not to troll when you started calling people "paranoid PC fanboys" instead of continuing the debate.  I don't mind you discussing things, but if you aren't going to respond to a point with any support for an argument, then I'm going to assume you have nothing left to say.

Yeah that's why I don't have a Gold subscription, my other consoles keep me happy.

[edit:  I keep hoping MS will make it free.  No dice so far.]

Blizzard was rolling in money even before they came up with the idea of WoW. If they hadn't done WoW we might have seen Starcraft 2 show up already, as well as Diablo 3, and maybe even a new franchise (They used to release a game/expansion almost every year before WoW). All I'm saying is that Blizzard is a big-hitter when it comes to PCs, as big as Nintendo is in the console ring.

On the general topic as a whole: The only reason PC gaming is in a dip is the same as one of the major reasons why Wii is whooping PS3 and 360. It's just plain easier to use a console than it is a PC. Any random person can press a power button and that's it. Not everyone can set up a PC and everything to get a game going. Therefore, it appeals to a larger mass of people, quite literally the way Wii appeals to people that never gamed before. It's sad that so many developers are jumping on the console bandwagon and abandoning the PC (I wish more people would do that for the wii actually...).

Another reason why PC gaming is in a dip right now is because the next-gen consoles just hit. They are as powerful as the PCs when they launched which stripped the PC of one of it's biggest pros against consoles. In a few years I hope that the PC will rebound back up when it gets a nice big lead on the consoles again.

Starcraft: best and biggest RTS ever.

Warcraft: best and biggest RTS franchise ever.

World of Warcraft: best and biggest MMORPG ever.

Diablo: best and biggest Action/RPG franchise ever.

Thanks, hard to find anything in this mess of a topic. 

Yes, it would look like dogshit compared to how it would run on a modern PC, but once again remember that a game like Bioshock is a console game of an entirely new generation, built around the 360, whereas that 2002 PC was built in the time of the Xbox, and undoubtedly ran all of the Xbox's games flawlessly.  Of course, those consoles were sort of abnormalities with Microsoft deciding to give their console a paltry 4 year life-cycle, but in general a computer built at the beginning or a year or 2 into a generation (like mine) will be fine for the duration of that console generation, with minimal upgrades.

Yeah, but console games get better and better, technically speaking, as developers get better at tweaking the hardware, so by the end of gen I would expect new 360 games to be in better shape than new PC games running on the late2005-early2007 PC.  You'd have more experience on this judging by firsthand knowledge though.  

As far as videogames in 2007... $18.85 BILLION was made in North America alone and $910 MILLION was from PC games. ( around 14% )

I'd say PC is niche.

Let's not even bring Win2k into this argument. It's folly.

Win2k was never meant to be a consumer operating system. The only reason it was later adapted into that role was because Win98 sucked so fuckin' hard that consumers were patching up 2k to get it to run games and other consumer-related programs.

Anyone who remembers patching the shit out of 2k just to get it to play games should remember how much of a business-grade OS it was in the beginning. Only later when MS started patching it did it become more game-friendly.