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One of the things that I keep touching on in the show is that the fact that PCs are dead. Or doing really well. Or the PS3 is going to overtake the 360, or that the 360 is going to remain dominant. Or the iPad will be a success. Here’s the arguments for all of these things, and yes I know each set contradicts the others.

PC Gaming isn’t in fact dead, it’s about to explode again.

Argument for the defence:

Ever since this generation of consoles launched the PC has been declared dead, but this doesn’t take into account the fact that in fact the platform has been going great guns in the meantime. Steam has taken off and throughclever use of sales has shown that PC games can have long tail sales years after their original releases. In the last few months I’ve grabbed games such as KOTOR and the UFO series as well as games from the last few years that are probably still on the shelves. Console games just don’t have this long tail in the same way for the publishers, in fact the games stores pretty much make sure that it’s only in the interest of the publisher to have discs on shelves for the first few months because they then take over with second hand sales for which the publisher gets nothing. A company like Blizzard is still selling copies of Starcraft and Warcraft 3 today. On top of that Steam is just such a convenient platform it’s made me impulse buy several games when I wouldn’t have normally.

The biggest advantage that the PC has is that the console platforms have given up competing with it by declaring that they are going to have 10 year cycles this time round. Can you imagine how good a 10 year old platform is going to look compared to a PC with the latest $100 graphics card? Games can get better looking over time, but they can’t squeeze the sort of power out that new hardware can bring. Already PC games are higher resolution and can avoid the nasty trick of using lower than HD resolutions for rendering elements that most console games resort to, and over time this is only going to get better.

The console platform holders are scared of one thing: People will break their DRM and make piracy as easy as it is on the PC. This gives the PC a big advantage because they ban something quite important: modding your games. The two giants in this arena are Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. There are tools available for them from the developers themselves that allow you to craft your own content right into the game. This is an invaluable tool for people who want more content, to tell a story or want to learn how to make content for games.

The compatibility problems of old are greatly improved, most games run fine on all modern graphics cards and we have DirectX 10 to thank for that. Yes, even for OpenGL and DirectX9 games. DirectX 10 drew a line in the sand and broke the cycle of cards just adding random features to DirectX 9 that may or may not be supported by rival card manufacturers in the same way. DirectX 10 demanded that a fixed set of features was implemented and now that nearly all cards are DX10 compatible in modern gaming PCs this has filtered down to the old DX9 games as well.

The final point to make is that PC  gaming is already much bigger than console gaming and so has already won. Casual gaming is much more massive than all the consoles combined, and distribution methods such as Facebook reach a staggering number of people. I know people will say that that’s not real gaming, but they are wrong. A game is a game, whether it’s World of Warcraft, Call of Duty or Farmville. Just consider how many more PCs there are than consoles and this fact: Valve consider the considerably smaller Mac market to be bigger than the PS3 market, that's the order of magnitude of the difference.

The argument for the opposition:

PCs are expensive and unreliable. You barely need to make more than that argument to guarantee that consoles will always win. You buy a PC from Dell, it comes and works for a year or two. New games start to get a little sluggish and so you buy a new graphics card, but your power supply isn’t powerful enough to run your new card so you need a new one of those as well. This isn’t consumer friendly gaming, this is hobbyist gaming. This may not matter to you or me, but to the average person (Let’s call them “Normals”) it’s a deal breaker when they can just grab a 360, PS3 or Wii and never have to worry about upgrading it, the PC just can’t compete. It’s not just graphics cards either, add a couple of more years to the cycle and you need a whole new set of brains (processor and memory) in order to run the latest games. You might as just well buy a new PC every 3 years, which given the 10 year cycle for the current consoles means that you’ll buy 3 PCs to every PS3 or 360 you buy.

There are three letters that strike fear into every PC gamer. DRM. Whether it’s a root kit installed by Sony, or a need for a constant internet connection to Ubisoft servers it never works reliably. Upgrade your operating system and the DRM will stop working because it was doing something nastily wrong in the first place. Hackers attack the authentication servers and you can’t play your game. You’re in a hotel room in the arse end of nowhere for work and you have no internet and you can’t play the games on your laptop. We all fear it, we all know that in a few years we’ll need cracks to even be able to play these games legitimately. We all know that consoles do it better.

Conclusion

The biggest threat to stop PC gaming becoming dominant again are the publishers and the pirates. Nobody is going to let DRM kill PC gaming, and with another half decade on this round of consoles to go it's the PCs game to lose. In 2015 PC games will look so much better than the PS3 and 360s it can't fail to win.