PC gaming is not dead, but saying that, the platform isn't doing great. I use to play loads of PC games, but have recently stopped as i'm just fed-up with the bugs (Bioshock, GTA 4, etc) to care anymore.

Plus i like the idea of a games collection, hence this can't be achived on the PC due to the Windows OS forever changing and when it does, it makes some of your games incompatible/redundant even.

Therefore i've stopped buying games for the platform altogether. With consoles i can have the games for decades and they'll still work, all you need is the hardware.

Not dead!?..... Just lost it's way!?

Since the inception of the current generation of consoles, there has certainly been less interest from some developers to bring games to the PC first. As a whole they have broadened their horizon and many more games have been released to consoles before a port to PC is even considered. This could be seen as a good thing, titles like The Witcher, Fallout3 and Oblivion. Once upon a time these games were only in the realms of the PC gamer. But are slowly becoming more accessible to console gamers I can see the reasoning for this, it's far easier to make money of the back of a thriving console market. But it also brings the games to whole other market of people that otherwise would be left out.

A massive hindrance to the PC is it’s modular nature. Your average PC gaming rig differs so greatly from machine to machine, that it is very difficult for those devs to get stable results across the board. Often compromising on image quality and post processing (GTA4PC?). At least when releasing a game on console you only have to worry about 1 or 2 hardware setups, making the whole process much easier to manage and bug fix along the way.

Nvidia in recent months have tried to rally the troops, by saying that they need to keep one hardware set for a set life cycle enabling them to handle learning curves with new hardware, which would draw the gaming rig into line with consoles. Funny isn't it.. Consoles have spent all this time evolving into PC/multimedia platforms and for the PC to evolve into a console/entertainment centres.

Serious gamers that have a gaming PCs as well as consoles, will probably already tell you that the quality of games betweens the format are of a very high standard and often identical, Xbox360 has a lot to do with this as the backend is all DirectX driven. So it begs the question what is in the point in building a gaming rig when you can get similar, if not identical results with a console for a fraction of the price, the casual gamers knows this..

Even as a serious FPS gamer I have trouble justifying SLI gfx cards every year. Don't get me wrong I would hate to see PC gaming die, there is much enjoyment to be had from the platform, but hardware manufacturers should have a look at the life cycle of there core hardware, maybe reassuring consumers that you'll be okay for a couple of years yet with those SLI'd GTX's

On the other hand, maybe there should be some divisions between work and pleasure, entertainment on the console in the living room and the main computer else where. I know from painful experience who difficult it is working from home with hard drive full of games… “Just on more round of Sharqi Peninsular and I’ll make a start…. Honest….”

I get the feeling their PC gaming is going to move to more of a 2nd party system, where Microsoft is the publisher, not the developer. Could be wrong.