I don't know why people insist on writing articles about PC gaming going extinct. Just because major publishers choose to push developers to develop games for consoles first and then do a shitty port to PC in order to maximize profit margins doesn't mean PC gaming is dead. It's like saying since the invention of penicillin all viral infections have gone extinct, we all know full well that isn't the case.
I think the far deeper problem is adaptation of video games in an average house hold we have seen in the last 20 years. Literally, when I was growing up, having a console or a PC at home was a luxury. It's good if every 1/5 kids had console or computer at home and were able to enjoy video games, the other 80% came over to enjoy the fun. The demographic today has significantly changed, majority of 90s generation has some access to video games be in form of console, pc or smart phone/tablet. I'm sure today there's 1/5 kids that doesn't have a console at home, and maybe 1/10 kids that doesn't have a computer at home.
It's all relative to how much the gaming population has grown (or in other words how main-stream videogaming has become). I do believe that the console market has grown a lot more than the PC market, simply put, due to the fact that gaming on a PC still requires you to know what the hell PC gaming is about, at least the basics, otherwise it's not very pleasurable experience if you cannot figure out the simple problems you might run into. Console gaming on the other hand is much more accessible, you don't have to have any clue about how it works and generally there's little problems. Consoles are much more appealing to casual gamers (that is not to forget that there's a large amount of people that play flash based games simply because it works from their browser)
However, there's another side of the coin the way I see it. Over the course of the last few decades we have acquired the new business venture for video game industry - publishers. I don't know how truthful my line of thinking is, so, this is just my opinion. In the 90s, companies that made good games (blizzard, westwood, akklaim, 3do, etc) were self sufficient, they needed funding but they found it in form of investors and other. Today we got these gargantuan conglomerates such as EA, Ubisoft and idsoftware. All these companies do is play boss for the developers, yes they pay the developer during the development cycle (so developer has less headaches over funding) but in return the publisher gets to push their schedule on the developer, the publisher gets the final say in everything, because they are the ones holding the coin purse. And as in any corporate environment you have number crunching economists that do nothing besides statistics, and they tell the publishers that it's more profitable to develop for consoles because the market base has increased substantially. In return we see good developers that have been known for making amazing games for PC turning towards console development first and PC porting second. It's sad really, but all it shows is that the industry is driven by the capitalist economy, has nothing to do with PC or console gamers or gaming. All it has to do is with cold hard cash.
This is also why we see such an uproar recently over video game piracy on PC. The piracy on consoles exists just as much, the problem is it takes a savvy user, and as I stated above a PC gamer is typically much more knowledgeable than a console gamer regarding the technical (or IT) stuff. So for PC market, piracy is much more of a threat than it is for console gaming, it has nothing to do with whether there's less or more piracy on either platform.
TLDR: PC gaming isn't dead, however independent PC game developers (like Valve) are slowly going extinct.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram