Well no one ever says their REAL age on the internet anyways. You usually have to take what they tell you and subtract 2 to get the real number.
If my math isn't rusty I'd say that means 12 was spot on. :D

Starcraft II
/discussion

PC Gaming was dying back when the PS2 was released.
It's gaming in general that is dying. During the PS2, XBOX, PC age there was still some difference between the formats when you looked a releases.
Nowadays you'll see the same releases on the PSP, DS, PS2, PS3, XBox360 and PC and Wii. Most often it either a sequel to a sequel, a remake, something branded or something gimmicky.
Especially the focus on casual gaming has been a deadblow. Casual games usually suck and the casual gamer seems not be that fond of gaming after all. The result is a market flooded with games no-one is going to buy.
An nothing kills a concept faster than a flood of rubbish that doesn't seem to go away

Oh boy. You're going to be getting SO MUCH fodder out of me!
I was always a split PC/console gamer going back to the NES/Famicom days. To me, the PC had unique experiences to distinguish itself from the consoles, and 99.9% of the games were brilliant.
However, by the late 1990s (I daresay by 1999), the PC gaming market had markedly changed. The 99th Deer Hunter ripoff game and umpteen millionth Tycoon or Sim-Whatever had absolutely killed the PC gaming market for the hardcore PC gamer such as myself. The complete and utter lack of originality sent me to the consoles such as the Nintendo 64, where some of the most original concepts originated (such as RTSes & FPSes on consoles).
Honestly, I really started buying console games in order to play the kind of games I liked, which were obscured in a sea of crap on the PC. I still played the odd game on PC, but that became rarer and rarer as the consoles kept impressing me.
And in 2006, I attempted to make a clean break from that PC gaming past after buying a Mac. I didn't succeed, because even 3 years later, I still crave those games I used to play, and I play with the idea (in my head) to run one of the virtualization packages just so I can play all those old games that can't be played in either DOSBox or ScummVM.
Maybe I was one of the geeky ones who just got hooked on PC gaming from a young age, but I'd love to go back and play those games I missed for one reason or another. Maybe that's why I like GOG so much. :D
BJ

PC Gaming cannot die.
Even if there wasn't a single new game released ever again you could spend a lifetime playing old games. harder game modes, modifications, custom multiplayer etc.
I haven't seen a single new idea in any game for years that wasn't already available in some existing game. No real reason to upgrade beside variation, curiosity, hype etc.
TBH when playing the top end game engines that exist even today I can honestly say that better graphics and more realism would add nothing at all to my gaming experience beyond what is already there.
Some of my favorite LAN fun even today come from games like skulltag doom2, the original unreal tournament. Even the ugly and dated diablo1 because of its less cookie cutter and more flexible char development, semi-hardcore elements like friendly fire etc.
If anything things are moving to fast. Many gems will just be forgotten and overlooked forever because by the time all the bugs are squashed and the engine/game modes/ballance/whatever is perfected everyone has already moved on to the next big thing.
Even today some games sell millions of copies so there is no way in hell people are gonna stop making pc games anyway. If you sell several million copies of something and still manage to go bankrupt the problem isn't the market. The problem is that you are spending to much money somewhere or are expecting to get paid like a rock star.
Let them eat some reality and make a fun game without 250 people working on it.
Who cares if the CEO of some big company will have to find another industry to pay for their fancy cars. As long as people are playing already existing PC games PC gaming is alive.
Besides like some other people said.. some genres are just way better on a beefy computer with a fast LAN and mouse & keyboard controls.

But that's the Nintendo way...
Also, isn't that what casual games are supposed to be? To be something quick and rather stupid to play after the first wave of killing time goes away? Peggle is no Crysis, and it will never replace it.

This thread is sounding less about the death of PC gaming, and more about people not liking the games that are currently being made. If we define PC gaming as "games I like", we can continue talking past each other for pages. Or maybe we are defining PC gaming as "games that were made when I was younger", in which case, the death of PC gaming is inevitable.

Well, actually you could. If PC gaming becomes more niche genres that have all but died out might make a recovery, like space combat sims.
That was what I was thinking.

The irony is that PC doesn't require require any of that ever. Game producers somewhere along the line decided that their customers want to do all that, or something.

The two aren't entirely unrelated. Lesser diversity in the types of games being made most certainly does not contribute to the health of PC gaming.

PC Gaming hasn't died, and never will, but it has changed drastically. It will never die, because the PC is too valuable a tool. As long as there are people with computers and time to kill there will be demand for games...and porn. Game developers however, have found console development increasingly to their liking. Consoles are now comparable to PC's in graphical power and there's none of that constant updating with patches in the face of umpteen million different configurations of individual users' machines. Thus, it's not the choice of the gamers but the game manufacturers who have increasingly released their A-plus titles in a console market first.
PC gaming has now split into two markets, the hardcore and the casual. Companies like Pop Cap have grabbed increasingly large slices of the market by making simple addictive games that business people, housewives or whoever can play for an hour or so. The hardcore market remains strong though, and one needs only look at Blizzard's sales figures to see that.
Of course we have to watch the term hard-core gamer, because that sometimes translates to "PC-Gaming Master Race who refuses to sully their hands with anything that even remotely resembles a game pad." A lot of these dismiss the cross-porting phenomenon because they feel that it "dumbs down" games to fit what they fantasize as the large unwashed mass of retarded console players out there who only like shiny buttons and graphics. Thus to them, PC Gaming translates to PC Exclusive, which I think is unfair and cuts people off from a lot of excellent games out there. I find that I'm never in short of new and interesting titles to check out, but that's just me.

I didn't mean people in general. I meant the people who are posting in this thread. Sorry for the confusion.

True, but not quite my point. My point is that we are discussing PC gaming, but the nature of the discussion shows that PC gaming does not mean "gaming on a PC" in this context. The meaning even seems to change from post to post. I guess that is fine if people just want to vent, but it doesn't make a very useful discussion beyond that.
Michaelleung's original post starts off sound like concern for the financial health of industry, but quickly moves into a discussion of game quality and a lack of PC exclusives. So PC Gaming is the existence of quality games developed primarily for the PC.
Then JudasIscariot says that PC gaming is dying because it's become easy enough that anyone can do it now; it's lost its exclusivity. So PC Gaming is a hobby enjoyed by the cognoscenti.
JohnMan argues that it's not dying because certain genres play better on PCs. Developers who want to make certain types of games and players who play them will generally prefer the PC. It's both an economic and a quality argument based on the superior hardware for those purposes.
And this is just halfway down the first page.
There are a few posts about how games were better a number of years ago. What that era spans varies from post to post, and sometimes one post excludes good examples from another. That's primarily an argument of quality, but it also carries quite a bit of nostalgia. One could imagine that PC gaming dies every time someone reaches a certain age. I certainly miss the feeling when it was all new.
All these are great issues and would make great discussions. Will PC exclusives disappear? Are any quality games being made for the PC these days, and by whom? Are the developers who primarily make PC games doing well? What is there for the more discerning or masochistic gamer? The list goes on.
But if we roll all the issues up into one ball called "PC Gaming", we can have fun kicking it around, but it won't reach any goal.

I find it kind of funny that you expect to reach a goal in a discussion on an internet forum...heh. But "PC GAMING" is everything that has been discussed, is the thing. You can't just take one point of the PC Gaming culture and say "this is the TRUE nature of PC Gaming!" Because it never has been and never will be just one point out of the stew that is the PC gaming experiance.

PCgaming has always been extremely varied. There are people who consider late nighties and early 21st century to be PCgaming golden age and from their perspective the current situation isn't good, the big budgeted FPSes and RPGs have most turned into multiplatform titles. On the other hand though they are forgetting that the period they consider to be the best was also a period when a lot of traditionaly PCish games were dying out. Adventure, sim, 4X, puzzle, hardcore RPGs or turn-based strategy. When they were playing all those exclusive PC FPSes fans of those genres were starving.
Now when plenty of big PC devs have switched to multiplat development, suddenly there's a lot more space for niche genres and developers to live in.
So while younger PCgamers see doom and gloom because their FPSes are becoming multiplat, older PCgamers who grew up in lae 80s/early 90s see their beloved genres like adventure, 4X or simulation slowly coming back to life.
Do I miss exclusive big budgeted FPSes? Sure. But on the other hand in the last 6 months I've seen releases of Steel Fury, T34, Over Flander Fields Phase 3, X3: Terran Conflict and most of all Black Shark. I have an actual back log of PC sims to play, a BACKLOG! I never thought something like this would happen ever again.
So it's not one sided. To you PCgaming might be dying, to others it's blooming and doing better and better