Business models surely aren't intended to be beneficial to the consumer? :) The GIllette razor model doesn't exactly do wonders for me, but I still buy the blades...

You make a fair point on exclusive titles, they are beginning to die a death. I wonder whether that might be more to do with a more (at the moment) even market share between the consoles, and the rise of middleware tools for games creation, though?

I really don't think that Sony and Microsoft see the PC as a threat to the console businesses, though. The markets are fairly separate. They aren't the ones that tell us that PC gaming is dying - people put that rumour around for themselves. It's not right, of course: it isn't dying, but it's most definitely changing and shrinking.

Finally, perhaps it's because I work with PCs day in and day out, but I do find them to be fairly dreadful things. I'm often called upon to train computer illiterate users in how to use applications, and it's at that point that it strikes you how unintuitive PCs (particularly Windows ones) are. Regular users, and I assume it's fair to include you in that group, don't notice it because we've become adjusted to the way that they've evolved. Windows 7 might be interesting if, as some people suggest, it's a fairly radical rethink of the way it presents its interface. But, hey, they said Vista was going to change everything and, erm, that hasn't exactly proved astounding. ;)

Fair enough. I guess it's difficult to correlate the playing of the games with the advertising revenue!

I'm not sure about this... Microsoft and Sony might make a loss on their consoles, but that's the way the business model (which Nintendo pioneered) works. They make their money on licensing on software sales.

As for why people would buy a console when they need a PC, well, they do. You can pick up PCs nowadays which'll run reasonably decent games for not much more than a PS3; but a PC is a horrid, clunky business tool. I don't really see that PCs and consoles are merging, rather that consoles are increasingly taking on more of the things that PCs do. That doesn't mean that they'll eventually blur into one; my mobile 'phone can play games, call people, browse the Internet, listen to music and more, yet I still have a separate handheld games console, landline phone, PC, iPod, etc. (I know there's a few flaws in that argument, but you see the point? :) ).

Some handheld games have the right idea, where you can just save at the point you're at and return back to it later (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a good example of this). It's not 'quick-save' in the sense that you can only reload it once, but it does away with the need for the stock phrase 'I'll be there in a minute; just need to find a save point...'.

Sorry, yes, you make a good point there. I can see the argument for digital distribution and MMO subscriptions, but do Flash games really make that much money?