Let’s face it. PC gaming is a dying culture. The days of Quake, DOOM, and Duke Nukem are over and the scene will never be the same again. MMORPGs have taken over PC gaming as the major genre and revenue puller. So what really happened? Here’s what I think:

1. DRM and Piracy - DRM has always been a huge taboo in gaming and it’s becoming more and more common in PC games these days. This is mainly due to the rising of piracy among PC games and now even consoles are suffering from it. X-Box 360 games are out sometimes even a month in advance of it’s street date. PC games have their copy protection cracked within days of its release, sometimes hours. But while DRM will help save their games the companies are taking it to an extreme, an example and probably the most recent case is EA’s blunder that is Spore. Even Steam games these days are not safe from piracy.

2. Consoles – From the moment consoles started to become a household thing was when PC gaming began it’s decline. What do kids ask for their birthday and Christmas? The newest console or the newest handheld so they can play it with their friends. Now a days people don’t build PCs, they buy a desktop or laptop pre-built and go with it not even worrying about gaming on it. Consoles these days have started to have more of a community feel to them than ever before. X-Box Live has become a huge success with the Playstation Network not far behind. The Wii’s online support is trash but since when has Nintendo ever been good at online gaming.

3. Exclusive Titles – Games don’t come out on one platform these days. It’s almost unheard of and usually considered a bad move depending on the company. Companies like Valve, who have been primarily a PC developer, has started putting it’s games on the 360 (without the same sort of support it’s PC counterpart gets) and now companies are even developing MMORPGs for consoles.

4. Competition – One thing PC games still have going for it is the tournament scene. People still play Counterstrike: Source or Unreal Tournament for cash every year, but how long is that going to last? Major League Gaming just recently closed shop and who knows how soon the rest of the scene will fold. Cons will always be a place for gaming tournaments but Cons don’t have a unlimited life-span and it all rests on the founder’s shoulders to keep it running.

5. MMORPGs – World of Warcraft, Warhammer, Guild Wars, Age of Conan, EVE Online. The list goes on and on and on but why does it? Because developing an MMORPG is like asking for free cash. Everyone is doing it, but because of that we have to wade through tons and tons of crap to get to even one shining gem of a game that probably won’t take off due to it being developed by some no-name company from Korea.

Like the arcades of the past, PC gaming is slowly becoming less and less what people what to do. Why pay a couple thousand dollars on a decent gaming PC when you could go to the store, buy a console for 200~300 dollars, a couple games, and start playing as soon as you unpackage the thing? Why pay 15 dollars a month for an MMORPG when you could pay about 10 for X-Box Live and have almost every title on the console supported somehow? Personally, PC gaming will always have that special place in my heart and seeing it die off makes a part of me just feel sad.

I dunno guys, I think this is pretty accurate.