I always get sucked into commenting on "PC gaming is dying!!11!1" stuff, even though everyone knows such articles come out every few months
They cite a drop in game sales, fewer developers making games exclusively for the platform etc. Why not change tack and turn the argument around? No-one makes an enormous loss on every PC sold, and developing for the platform requires no hefty licence fees to the manufacturer.
Only Nintendo manages to turn an actual profit on hardware sold, and they manage that with thrifty, arguably out-dated components. How much longer can the console companies keep it up? Sony made a huge loss this year. As a certain opinionated website put it, if you earned $1 this financial year you made more money than Sony.
All this is common knowledge, and yet people always default to pointing the finger at PC gaming, ignoring the
enormous financial losses that the supporters of the console market are making. Sure, Microsoft have deep pockets, they can suck it up for a while. Sony does too, but then SCE found its profits actually propping up the rest of Sony's departments. Which rather invalidates the assumed safety-net of being part of a company with fingers in other, equally lucrative pies.
Of course I'm not saying console gaming is going to die, but "people in glass houses" and all that. The backlash over the PS3's price, blu-ray etc. was pretty much unprecedented.
As always I think the PC market will tick over quietly like it's always done. It's pretty much the only gaming platform that's endured all the way from the 8-bit console generation to now. For some reason that achievement never occurs to the doomsayers before they go into another "It's dying!" schtick. Which is pretty much the opinion the article ends with, somewhat invalidating the writer's entire article prior to the penultimate paragraph.
Oh, and consoles seem to be well on the road to turning into PCs anyway