NPD numbers are a bit of a farce, mainly cause they are centred around the US market (PC gaming is alot more mainstream in Europe than in the US) and secondly they don't count DD numbers.
According to the PCGA released numbers last years, the profits on the PC as a gaming platform was more than all consoles put together.
Sure, mainstream tittles seem to be shoving off to consoles (at the cost of lower quality in games in my opinion) but the way I see it PC gaming was never about main stream. Most of the greatest PC games are still somewhat underdogs or started as such.
If today's market concept means spending two years making a game with all the graphical bells and whistles which then amount to 8 hour gameplay... well... they can stay on consoles as far as I'm concerned.
Those big budget tittles don't sell that well in the PC world due to the fact that after years and years of quality in gaming (stories, gameplay, originality, etc) we get handed cookie cutter formulas for gaming now a days and of course it will not sell well. Call me elitist if you wish, but one can only play the same kind of FPS or TPS so many time.
In closing: Reasons why it’s worth to be a pcgamer

LIES.

You didn't even mention the Billions spent on high performance video cards, CPU's, memory, HDD's, motherboards, and power supplies. All of which are bought with gaming in mind and aren't neccessary for general computing.

Discussions about the death of PC gaming have a curious way of turning from concern about the health of the industry to a concern about the quality of the games. We get assertions that sales are down along with assertions that companies are trying to sell games to the unworthy masses. Games that sell well don't count because they are "dumbed down." If PC gaming ever truly dies, it will be the result of the mystagoguery of its partisans.

I have a very simple theory on this whole 'Death of PC gaming thing'
PC gaming became truly, massively popular when the internet became mainstream. Suddenly everyone is getting PC's in their houses, people who had no need for one, suddenly wanted one for the internet. PC's before then had always been, in the majority a business/work thing. A computer at home was for the rich or geeky.
Alot of these new users were families and the kids/teens did what kids/teens do, made it into a 'toy' by buying video games. And ofcourse people tend to buy the best that they can afford so there is no worry about minimum specs. Alot of these kids probably had consoles before then.
Then their computer dropped below minimum specs of games and the people that played the sims and other such games on their pc's couldn't anymore and they bought consoles because they were also DVD players and plugged into the TV, and if you put your game into the thing it ran without any hassle.
Consoles have a longer shelf life then most PC's and are cheaper so ofcourse the potential audience will plummet once that intial generation of PC's gradually become outdated.
PC gaming isn't dying it's just going back to what it was; less mainstream, more fringe.

Yup!

Yawh....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

The long answer is actually NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....etc :-P

I could not have created a better illustration of my point.

A part of me thing that PC gaming can't die because it's already dead, at least mostly.
With some little exception, like Witcher, PC gaming has just become the remote backyard of consoles. There are still plenty of games still released on PC but for most of them it's no longer PC games it's just console games ported to PC. And sadly with most of the flaws inherent to consoles; FPS and RTS are slowed down to be played with a PAD, interface is also thought to be watcher on a TV and used with a pad, etc...
Don't get me wrong I don't have anything against consoles, I have a PS2, PSP, DS and play often with them it's just I always liked a "difference" that existed between PC and console games, difference that no longer exists.
I kind of agree with JudasIscariot; I think that the best thing that might happens to PC gaming would be to "die" completly (i.e. the big names abandoning it) and go back to its roots, away from the "multi-millions finished in 5 hours blockbusters" or casual "yet another bejeweled clone" puzzles games.
Finally the PC gaming aliance, with friends like Epic (one of the PCGA "founder"), PC Gaming doesn't need any enemy...

I'm not going to read through this whole thing, I just want to tell you to stop making these stupid threads. Coke vs. Pepsi, Burger King vs. McDonalds, PC gaming is dying, etc. What are you, twelve?

I think that currently the PC is to Hollywood games, as the DVD/VCR is to Hollywood movies.
We're not always treated like second-class citizens - sometimes we even get special features - but we're definitely the second consideration.
If this is the type of "PC Gaming" that is going to die, that is fine by me - if Hollywood games can hurry up and die, maybe PC gaming websites will get more like Adrian Werner's (frequently mentioned elsewhere in this thread), and stop reviewing year-old console games.
If you believed that Burger King was at risk of closing down, and honestly thought they had a better product range, I hope you would find a fast food forum and raise it as an issue.

I think he is around 14 actually.

xDDDD
You made my day.