You mean like, when 360 owners trash PS3 games graphics and get pwned, like... this?

OT: Good news for the 360, bad news for the PC.

Alan Wake looks awesome, so lets hope it gets decent sales.

It would be a bigger dig at gaming PCs actually. Specifically PC VGA cards.

Anyway, services like Onlive have a mountain of hurdles to leap before their business model becomes truly viable, even if it works like "magic."

Not being able to play any games at all if I'm experiencing any network issues alone would keep me personally from using something like Onlive as my be all solution for PC games.

MANY?  I am sorry, believing you cloned one or two 100 million times, doesn't make that MANY (if you did do it, it would be the same voice over and over).  I saw ONE article on here regarding that on here in the MONTHS I have been reading.  But I guess you assumed that ONE article was over a dozen, by a bunch of pro-PC Michael Pachters type analysts.

PC gaming is either Downloads or pirates, with the retail area shrinking down to the size of what Macs used to hold.

And good luck waiting on OnLive, that didn't even bother showing up at E3.  Nice to know you can play Crysis on a lousy laptop, and play 2008 videogame releases that are then released on the PC this year, and believe they are 2009 PC game releases, because they were released on the PC this year.

Not dead, but Microsoft closing down PC development studios should be a tip-off to something going on regarding them and PC gaming.

It's only "gimped" if your mainstay games are more suited for console tastes.

With the amount of crossover these days, it's very easy to confuse one for the other.

Games like DMC4 or SF4 showing up on PC (being very console centric games) was a nice service for PC gamers, but entirely motivated by Capcom's push to see the most sales and profits possible over any and all platforms. Nothing wrong with that. But not every game developer/publisher has been able to successfully do this.

The PC gaming model is still hugely viable, but it definitely favors certain types of games over others, mainly MMORPGs or any games with subscription services, where the subscription fees, rather than revenue generated through installations (be it retail disc, DD, whatever) are responsible for profitability.

Alan Wake's problem on PC is the likelihood that this is a single player adventure type game which most will only play through once (low replay value in general). That is prime for piracy, even moreso due to its likely high hardware requirments. PC gamers will want to see how well it runs on their system regardless of whether they actually want to play the game.

People do seem to be pulling numbers out of assumptions at this point.

But it's pretty hard to deny that retail PC gaming is on the decline (even if just off anecdotal observations of shrinking retail space for games). More PC gamers are buying their games through DD services. And unfortunately, even more are simply stealing their games online for free.

I'm not even sure why anyone is touting Onlive as the future of PC gaming at this point, even if it does work EXACTLY as advertised on the weakest Atom powered netbook in existence as well as 10 year old PCs held together with bubble gum and duct tape. Onlive has a huge amount of logistical issues to address before their business model is viable. No one should count on it "replacing consoles."

But if they get everything up and running and are able to convince all the major software publishers to partner up, it's not going to be limited to old games obviously. Any new PC release should be made shortly avalable for play, no different than Steam or other DD services.

PS3 and PC fans want Microsoft to fail in the console business, so that it both forces Microsoft's development to stay on the PC only, and forces console owners to ONLY buy a Sony console, so third-party will not divide their efforts elsewhere, and the PS3 owners can feel like they are top dog.  That is what is going on here.  Besides, this move also undermines the Playstation fanboy charge that the ALL games on the 360 are also on the PS3, so why bother with an XBox console? 

shio comes on a videogame fan forum (mostly console owners) and needs to feel ballsy about the PC's standings for gaming, so anything that undermines this would cause shio's world to fall apart.  He can't bear to think that consoles still remain relevant, and for a multitude of reasons, more developers would rather create games for consoles than the PC.

So the electronic gaming industry is bigger in these other PC-centric countries by a factor of what?  Can you list that number?  Please state how much more video/computer games sell in Eastern Europe and Asian then the markets mentioned.  Can you even do this?  Or, do you like to lurk behind fog, with the belief in this fog is a monster that will devower all the console peons that refuse to bow to the glory of your PC master race.  And if these markets are so huge, as you hint at, and digital downloads as large as you are making them out to be, why doesn't Acitivision list them?  Are they hiding these revenues offshore in accounts, to avoid paying taxes?  Isn't there laws against this, and there could be a class-action lawsuit by shareholders for underreporting revenue?  Or, is it that the money from digital downloads and unreported countries are unknown by Activision, and it shows up in unmarked bills in their corporate headquarters when they aren't looking?  In other words, they accounting flat out SUCKS that they are unable to track revenue.  Or is it that you count PIRATING of games as actual digital distribution of games?

And how much bigger is digital downloads over the entire videogame industry?  You make it out like Steam is bigger than World of Warcraft. 

If MS dropped out of the play field I would just get a PS3. I enjoy the xbox more because of the few Microsoft big exclusives and the fact every game is online one way or another or at the worst has acheesements. But to be honest if you go to Wikipedia the exclusives between both platforms is few and far between, just sometimes PS3 gets games months later as MS gets their "timed exclusive" (and sometimes the 360, but it was worth it IE Virtua Fighter 5 with online).

I would also say the worst part about PC ports is sometimes that come out many months later. If SFIV had a very competitive online portion for the PC and was released the same time the 360 and PS3 versions are out it would be a different story as well.