Quote: "1. Consoles are much cheaper and offer a better gaming experience for a majority of people who like games. (Even the PS3.)"
Not true, a PC and easily duplicate any console experiance, if you don't like the keyboard and mouse combo, go buy a gamepad, there's enough of them sold. Plus you get more choice, mid air controllers, wireless controllers, force feed back, and everyever else you could desire.
Also the gaming experiance is pretty much even, depending of cause of the hardware you have. PC games interfaces are often more intutative. The mouse pointer moves on screen and clicks, it's much easier and more accurate to use a mouse to click on something, rather than hitting a controller button that cycles though all the options on the screen, delaying a move.
As for cheaper, yes this is true, but you can't open a console and shove a new graphics card in it either.
Quote: "2. Top graphics hardware is now selling close to $1000 for the top spec. Noone will be playing the look-how-fast-my-PC-is game anymore."
So don't get top selling hardware, you certainly won't find it in an X-Box, get a mid range card instead, it will last you a couple of years at least. They are around the $120 range.
Quote: "3. Top processors are now being released at $1000 (eg: Quadcore)"
Duel cores aren't even properly supported yet in the vast majority of applications! Be realistic, just because something is top of the line, doesn't mean you have to get it. Get a duel core instead for about $140 and you'll again, have a system that will last a couple of years.
Quote: "4. The increasingly larger jumps in PC computing power are now about to make PCs become obsolete far quicker."
Rubbish. Game designers program what what's affordable now, and what's in service. What is the point of making Oblivion Direct X 10 only when few have vista or a DX 10 card? No 7xxx series nvidia cards will still be used in the next three years time even if they are not top of the line. I'm using a 5xxx series card, as are alot of others, it still manages to play the lastest tomb raider game without big problems. Oblivion is really ahead of it's time, and quite unusual compaired to 90% of games sold.
Quote: "5. The cost of developing games for such drastically different computer specs, plus the standard of detail that will need to be reached to satisfy top-end owners (and the very few of them who actually see and appreciate all that hard work) will mean they will always be available on console aswell and never take full advantage of the hardware."
Every single console game is developed on a PC. The only real difference for game programmers is the flexibility of graphical settings allowing the user to adjust his or her experiance.
Quote: "6. I predict that Crysis will be one of the last really good looking PC only games -"
There's a difference between PC Only, and not selling PC games. Most games are programmed in C, which is cross platform compatible. Also you don't need to pay sony/ microsoft, massive licence fees to make a game for a PC, so many companies develope for the PC frist, then when they have a product, port it over.
Quote: "7. - and the Games for Windows rating system won't save PC gaming."
What's to save? There's certainly still alot of PC games being sold!
Quote: "(I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong. )"
No one can truely predict the future. So only time will tell.
Finally, remember that consoles are getting more and more PC like with every generation. Hell the PS3 is based on Linux for heavens sake, with about a million programs and features. And they are suffering for it, the Nintendo Wii has alot more support because it still very much remains a simple to use game platform while sony's slowly becoming a nightmare. Sony has a bad habbit of not listening to it's customers, nintendo on the other hand, tend to pay more attention to the consumers.
If nintendo wins, then consoles will likely return to gaming only machines with perhaps a few features like internet and chat. If Sony win's then it will most likely end up becoming a PC like machine, overly complicated. In which case there will end up being a Sony, Apple, PC devide which PC will most likely win because it's flexible, and anyone can make them, wherehas you have to be an offical apple distrubuter to make and sell apple parts, which makes those parts much more expensive then PC parts.
