Games like Diablo 3, The Sims, Half Life, Portal (I.E. PC Centric games/franchises) generally do far better on the PC than console.
PC as a market is actually larger than the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 combined in terms of how much cash is floating around.
In terms of the amount of gamers, there are more PC gamers than any singular console.
And Steam has more games than exists on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.
So really, it's not a case of how much worse games sell on PC, but how much more competition there is for everyone's dollar, you have more chance of a small/indie developer being incredibly successful on the PC than on the console, the consoles reward the generic rehashed AAA franchises on a yearly basis.
It doesn't help that a game on Steam can sell millions of copies and never be counted, also doesn't help that the more high-end PC gamers *hate* the lazy horrible ported console games that don't support PC centric features.
On the flip side, console games once released can sell large amounts of copies of a particular game, but after that the game will generally fall into obscurity, never to be heard of again.
On the PC however games have stupidly long legs, for instance lets take the original Fable as an example, when it was brought to the PC all those years ago it sold moderately well, then almost a decade later it was re-released on Steam, hit the top of the sales charts and shifted hundreds of thousands of units.
Then every-time it's on sale, it again hits the top of the charts, selling 10's of thousands more units, so over time PC games can outsell the console version and those legs can last well over an entire console generation, the bonus is, the developer needs little/no extra work for such a long income stream.
The problem is, the PC's sales tracking is almost non-existent both in the short and long term, thus sales should always be taken with a grain of salt on vgchartz for the PC.