To tell the truth, I expect PC gaming to grow in the coming years and as a result, PC gamers will be treated better than in the past. This is because current gen consoles are so weak and PC gaming is becoming more and more convenient and cheap. I've already decided to kick PS4/Xbone in the curve this gen and go with PC + Wii U. I plan to connect my new PC to the TV and play with an Xbone gamepad, so the only difference I'm gonna get is that I will get better graphics and 1080p/60fps+ in all games. If more people do what I do, the devs will react and follow the money.

Lower? Yes (except for PSP, which puts PC to shame), but in your post you made it sound like console piracy was non-existant, which is completely false. Over here many shops sell brand new consoles with pirate chips already intalled in them, so you get a shop guarantee on the whole set.

I guess piracy is less common on consoles because people choose consoles out of conveniece/laziness in the first place and in the West/Japan they don't bother getting through the hassle of pirating their consoles, since games are very cheap when compared to their earning either way.

No.
Publishers push games out on consoles faster because consoles have shorter lifespans and life cycles.
The physical nature of console games makes them sell far better at Christmas than PC digital games.Even more reason to push them out to a deadline.
PC games can slow burn for years, since steam releases never become obsolete.

Read again.

Piracy on the consoles i explicity specified, does not exist. (yet)

Cool, but the topic isn't about this gen only and the discussed issue hasn't appeared this gen. Nothing has changed in the industry across the last gens, so your argument bears no weight. Piracy or no piracy - nothing changes for the discussed matter, which proves there in no such "elephant" in the room. PC became marginalized when console piracy was easy and quite common, with all consoles on the market cracked. The fact that these 3 consoles aren't cracked yet has no impact whatsoever.

And yet, it does, since investment per title is much greater now than in previous generations, so companies have more to lose by investing in pc builds of a game that may or may not be successful, many publishers only finalize the descision for 8th gen pc ports based off of the commercial viability of the console counterparts, conversely if a game sells terribly on console and isn't a costly port, publishers may choose to have the title ported to PC cheaply to try and decrease the impact, or if the title sells extremely well on console they may choose to release on pc riding on the back of the consoles buzz and praise.

Few developers and publishers these days focus on joint pc/console releases unless the title is a longstanding franchise, or if they have specifically developed the title on an engine that already has good support for PC.

From the OP "Especially this generation, PC seems to be an afterthought, despite some devs and pubs claiming otherwise. "

OP talks about this Gen and you speak about piracty on the psp, Tachikoma speaks about piracy effecting games on Wii-U, PS4 and X1 and you reply with how consoles in the last generations were hacked (ps3 wasn't hacked until the later half of its life, X360 while hacked early on for single player stuff ended up being removed from XBL and bricked in cases) Even the 3ds which has just seen the beginnings of pirated games now, launched in 2011, 4 and a half years to wait for a pirated game, in comparison if you went on any torrent sites the day after GTA5 came out on the PC there was multiple torrents of the game listed there.

If the PC gaming community were faced with a 5 year wait to get a crack to play a pirate copy of a AAA PC title it would be the news of the century, even Batman Arkam was praised for the anti piracy measures which kept people from that game for almost a month before patches were released to stop the piracy measures impeding on paying customers.

Cool and all, but this has nothing to do with the discussed issue The elephant you described doesn't exist the way you put it. Simple.

PC was put on the backburner when piracy on consoles was easily available and it started its resurgence in that state of the market as well. The fact that secure (thus far) consoles were recently released hasn't changed a single thing thus far for the discussed issue. Has the situation of PC gamers deteriorated once this gen started? No. One could say it's even getting better, as this gen it has become obvious that the PC version of a game will be by far the ultimate version (GTA5, The Witcher 3, Project CARS, etc.) and the console port won't even come close. So it is not an issue and not the reason for the current situation

To put it simple, this feat alone means nothing for this situation, so it can't be called "the elephant". Especially, since I believe that PC market is going to grow and console market is bound to shrink even if consoles remain secure, which will easily eat into whatever can possibly be gained due to consoles being secure.

You can sort of not play WoW and a few other MMOs, you can still play them on pirated servers but obviously it's a bigger difference between paid/pirated versions of something like GTAV in terms of what you get for your money/download crack being almost the same experience.

Agree with you 100% tho, money rules the whole system and publishers should indeed cash in where there is solid cash to be made rather than offer up their wares to communities who attack games at times for not optimizing their software to run on every concievable PC setup under the sun and will often use this as an excuse to pirate the game since the dev didn't work hard enough to bother paying for.

I know the guys who really benefit from piracy: Nvidia, Intel, AMD, MSI, ASUS.........xD