The thing about it now is if consoles were to implode next generation for some reason, it will hurt PC gaming quite a bit also. Indie games and some AAA stuff will still come out, but a good portion of the games made with the console market in mind then ported to PC will be gone. Either canceled because they can't make enough money on PC to cover development costs, or have their budgets drastically reduced.

Okay, thanks. I tried looking up merging profiles and there's some bit of convoluted advice involving creating multiple accounts, and I figure since the only thing I really want from my local profile is the avatar I can recreate it with the online profile or just lose it. So the advice to delete the local profile is probably the best.

This may have been mentioned in the thread somewhere, but I think one of the incentives to go to a console model - at least for Microsoft - was concern about protecting a place in the household for Microsoft software. There was a concern early on that the consoles could be developed into something that would replace the place of the PC for many users.

I think it turns out that smart phones and tablets may have been the real threat to MSFT, but at the time it was not unrealistic to see a game console evolving into the primary home TV/game/internet/computing device.

Conceptually, the difference between PCs and consoles is freedom.

PCs are free-er which is both a blessing and a curse.

In consoles, your experience is strongly controlled, which means fewer things can go wrong, but it also means everybody (the end user and the game creator) are at the mercy of the console manufacturer (and they do siphon a lot of money as the middleman with the bigger end of both sticks).

The problem with free (and the free-er you get, the worst it tends to get) is the expectation that everyone should be a technical genius and/or invest the time to learn the inner workings of things to make it all work.

It becomes pretty bad when the system you need to get what you want done requires dozens of components and each of those component require you to read a manual (sometimes spanning dozens of pages or even hundreds) to use with minimal competency.

Microsoft understood this problem and I think this is the main reason why Microsoft has been so successful (and in the process, mitigated many of those problems for the end user at the cost of freedom).

Linux is catching up.

I think all that is required for free-er system to work is humility on the part of the people designing those systems: taking the time to relate to potential end users, anticipate their difficulties and invest the time to address those difficulties even if they really wouldn't be a problem if the end user knew just a little bit more.

On the PC, you can play FPS games (among all the other things). On a console, you can pretend you are capable of doing so....