In 2008 I bought about 5 games from UK retail, got about 30 off steam. The 30 I got were mostly in game packs like Unreal deal pack and id complete pack, but some standalone ones as well like TF2, L4D. Im looking into buying GTA4 though steam now. I do believe that PCs games sell more than consoles as a whole.

I don't know if it was mentioned, but I think theres more piracy in PC gaming then console. In my whole class, I'm the only one that buys original games, all the others pretty much dl them.

I don't think the differences between an FPS using an analog stick/wiimote and a mouse are pronounced enough for most people. Hell, people didn't widely stop using the keyboard until after doom. I don't even remember if wolfenstein originially had mouse support.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/89124-the-video-game-industry-an-18-billion-entertainment-juggernaut

http://kotaku.com/5038833/pc-gaming-a-107-billion-industry

18 billion >>> 10 billion

Nuff said.

No we don't need them. Yeah sure a whole slew of developers will close because they won't make enough money, but in the end only the devs who can actually make GOOD games will remain. Survival of the fittest, and currently the consoles are only promoting more and more mediocrity for one reason or another. And hey, it's not all PC games > all console games. It's just that the best games of the PC >>> the best games on the consoles in their genres.

I admit I can't find the logic in any of this. Only the great survive, huh? I guess it doesn't take long for people to forget Looking Glass choking to death on its own puke.

And the best PC games >>>>>>> the best games on the consoles in their genres? What does this one even mean?

Hey at least the devs there went on to make Irrational Games and continued to make some badass games.
Also I meant that if it's a game that can be made well on a PC (meaning platforming, sports, etc. are excluded) then th best of the genre on the PC is far far better than the best of the genre on the consoles.

Edit: A quick wikipedia of what happened to the devs in Looking Glass:

After the company folded, people from Looking Glass went on to work at Ion Storm, Irrational Games, Harmonix, Mad Doc Software, Arkane Studios, Valve, and to found Floodgate Entertainment and Digital Eel, amongst other later studios. Ion Storm Austin developed Thief: Deadly Shadows, the third game in the Thief series. Arkane Studios went on to develop Arx Fatalis, a dungeon crawling game that bore heavy resemblance to Looking Glass' cult series Ultima Underworld, and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which was co-designed by Floodgate. Ex-Looking Glass personnel have worked on such games as Deus Ex, Guitar Hero, Half-Life 2, Freedom Force, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Bioshock, Empire Earth II and Star Trek: Armada II among others.

P.S. I'd kill for a new Freedom Force or a true new Thief.

Knights of the Old Republic was better than the original Fallout and it was on the Xbox first.

There.

I said it.

I'm not sorry.

I probably played Fallout 3 more than any other game excepting Europa Universalis 3 and Medival Total War 2 last year. Although I enjoyed it (I hope they keep VATS in future games), I wouldn't say the political satire/philosiphy is all that sophisticated and it's definitely been sanitized from earlier fallouts. It didn't really bother me though as the game doesn't take itself to seriously.

As far as 360 only games are concerned my experience is limited to a friend who occasionally brings his over when he comes into town. I am probably the only person in the world who went to owning an PS3 from an Xbox1 which was the first console I had owned since the SNES. I don't really use either for gaming, the xbox functioned as a cheap HTPC. I have the PS3 because my research involves allot of coding for a PS3 cluster we have set up and it's impolite to bring down random nodes on the cluster with untested code. Hence it's usually booted into linux and since I loath rebooting I tend to only play games on it infrequently. I've probably played the Wii the most because every girl seems to own one and it makes for an excellent excuse to go home with these girls.

The stuff I've seen from Gears of War has at least superficially seemed to primarily involve a bunch of roided out alpha males with chainsaws and no necks. The I-feel-like-I'm-in-a-frat vibe the more popular xbox games seem to gravitate toward isn't my thing. I hear that game where you play a douchey abercrobie model, son of legendary British paramilitary war criminal Francis Drake who like his father goes on a latin american killing spree so he can pimp out his car with gold rims or something, stole it's cover mechanic (which I thought was neat) from GeOW. Is there anything else unique about Gears?

It's not that I think games with sex/violence are inherently juvenile. The problem is when you are targeting games towards horny male teenagers who think rambo is not only plausible but that they too could kill 40,000 Vietnamese soldiers with their bare hands if they needed to also.

The Close Combat games were extremely violent, but in a way that gave you a real sense of how messy war is. In every fight it was pretty much a certainty that a number of your troops would get killed and/or maimed, that when you stormed a building a small group of reserves could kill an elite squad of storm troopers in the chaos, and that most of the time everyone is just wasting ammunition causing loses to slowly build up while tearing up the landscape. Noone has special super powers and everyone is easily killed.

 And this, is pretty much the personification of why the PC needs consoles to still be a viable market.

 So, in a hypothetical world where consoles don't exsist and PC is this nishe gaming platform for people who want the best graphics and gameplay, you'd expect publishers to put money into a market of 'survival of the fittest' where one bad game could see them bankrupt and gone?

 To me that sounds like the exact business model any company looking to survive will run a thousand miles from and not look back. Nowadays we see software once reknown for it's success of PC (such as WRPGs?) sell far better on the consoles, they wouldn't exsist if the consoles didn't, not in the state we know them today, anyway.

Also I've no intention of getting into your elitist views on PC being some Godly platform of quality. Aside from the whole ordeal being complete subjective, it wreeks of this desperate PC gamer in denial that what was once the prime of video games is a shrinking nishe in which fewer and fewer care to invest, buy and enjoy games in.