Tim Sweeney and co speaking thru the mouths of their puppets again. Let's look at the facts.
1) PC gaming, thanks to Steam, has never been healthier. And a *lot* of this is down to smaller indy devs, and the freedom the PC platform gives them.
2) PC gaming has been impected by the vile activities of Intel and Nvidia, artificially inflating the cost and reducing the performance of PC hardware. When Intel saw that competition from AMD was ending (during the Bulldozer phase), it reversed policy, canned the plan for 6+ desktop cores, and actually pushed *two* cores for gaming, and paid devs to go back to single-threaded code. Nvidia chose instead to inflate the cost of GPUs by more than twice.
3) But AMD is back, and on TSMC. Zen2 has knocked out Intel, and made possible the concept of 8 *powerful* CPU core console design. AMD's future GPU designs, now the 'problem' engineer works at Intel, will match Nvidia at a fraction of Nvidia's current cost.
4) The PS5 and Xbox Next will offer a level of gaming performance that most people will have to spend twice as much to get on their gaming PC (well informed PC home builders can always get better value, but they are less than 10% of PC gamers).
5) After the new consoles hit, there will be the usual two years+ period where publishers assume the average gaming PC barely matches the last gen (your current gen) consoles, so make rubbish PC ports. The PC like nature of the current and new consoles may alleviate this issue this time, but may not.
6) AMD seems set to launch new PC GPUs designed to be *slower* than the new consoles as a sop to Sony and MS, although this should still allow near 1080TI performance on the desktop for a fraction of what Nvidia charges for this today.
7) the new console target rez is 4k, but the gaming PC is 1440P, making things easier on the gaming PC.
8) new levels of RAM/CPU/GPU resources in consoles and gaming PCs makes game dev easier than ever before.
9) if AMD chooses to pull out their finger, and release a gaming APU on the desktop anything as powerful as the consoles get, 1080P PC gaming could get very cheap indeed- in much more lounge friendly cases.
The real question is whether computer gaming ends up coming down to hardware entry cost. The new consoles are going to be astonishing value for money when compared to an equivalent gaming PC- but tons of console owners are already crying like babies at the thought of 500 dollar consoles. For them, they have no awareness of value, just a concern about the ticket price. PC gamers are much more informed, but this could mean *they* are converted to the new consoles on cost per spec alone.
On the other hand, when PC gamers talk in forums, it is to appreciate everything the freedom of the PC brings to the table. A philosophical position where the cost is something that just has to be swallowed in the name of the hobby.
Now the *PC* market is declining thanks to the greed and the shenanigans of those that make the RAM, HDD, and the despicable strategies of Nvidia and Intel. Too many companies chose to screw over the PC market during the 'good times', and the fallout is now. But that's *general* PCs not gaming PCs.
When a useless psuedo analyst corp like JPR looks at anything, there's no science to the process. Which is why they *always* fail to predict *new* trends. Their only method is extrapolation from the simplest data in its crudest form. So they take the fact most people have played 'minefield' or 'solitaire' on their office/work PC, and call that decline a "PC gaming" decline. Disingeneous, dishonest and meaningless. Like the stats that declare that "more women are gamers than men"- as if the people that read the 'funnies' in the newspapers should be included in the list of people who read novels.
I think PC gaming will continue to have healthy growth, for I think it is a male hobby still popular with males desperate for a safe home activity who think consoles too 'mainstream'. Besides a console is hardly a hobby when the corporation has the console owner by the short and curlies.
The whole history of home computing is remarkable, and at every stage, the usual braindead mainstream 'journalist' has mocked it and described it as a 'fad' soon to be over. I speak as one whose first computer was the self-build Sinclair MK14 (that you literally had to code in *machine code* on a hex membrane 'keyboard' that had no user storage device, so each time you wanted to use it you had to type the program in first- funfact the tech term 'bootstrap' originated from the same idea, where a minimal program had to be hand entered each time the computer was started, that would then 'boot' the OS from a strorage device, pulling the computer up by its own boot-straps).
Before I owned my MK14, I remember a news report from years earlier showing a production like turning out early single chip CPUs, and saying this tech would change the world. I promise you, those that call themselves game and tech 'journalists' have no love of tech, and despise those that do- a psychology that goes back to their school days. People who make their living writing are almost never part of 'nerd' culture- tho sometimes it benefits them to pretend they do.
PS I still think tech costs matter. The internal HDD has priced itself out of interest of many PC owners for no good reason except blind self-defeating greed, and of course the external HDD and SSD has taken its place. What Nvidia and Intel did to hurt PC gaming sickens me, but it is glorious that PC gaming survived to see a true renaissance for AMD, and a real possibility for sane PC gaming components. If AMD's Navi is around 200 dollars for a little less than 1080TI performance (which only adjusts the historic price of GPUs back to where they were before Nvidia's tech lead allowed them to screw over gamers), PC gaming costs are good for another two years and this covers the tough time of the new consoles hitting.
Nvidia will do nothing to save PC gaming without AMD regaining some parity, and Intel is now down and out *forever*. I don't like having to place my final hope in one corporation, and AMD has made some astonishing management mistakes in the past- but honestly today AMD is the *only* hope, and that AMD also makes the leading console tech is a clear conflict of interests that certainly makes things 'interesting'.
