Hate to burst your bubble, but what the hell BF1942 server were you playing on with 255 other people? The most I remember was 64 and that seemed to be pushing it with the size of the maps. The most I've ever seen in a multiplayer game on the PC was Joint Operations at 150 although it got really laggy when the battles started to get concentrated.
I agree that PC gaming is not dead, but it's not doing anything that would make me purchase a new video card this generation and that's what component manufacturers and game developers should be focusing on. If I can play the majority of the games on the horizon on a console that's less than $300 why on earth would I throw upwards of $500 at a new GTX 280?
Hopefully when Intel enters the GPU arena they can actually get some developers on their side, something that AMD and Nvidia haven't had much luck with in the past few years. PC gaming is far from dead, but it seriously needs a shot in the arm right about now. Of the last 5 games I've purchased for the PC, 3 of them were already on consoles and a 4th one is headed to a console in the near future, so you can't say that it's not sharing the same market as the consoles.
Right now, as it stands, PC gaming is an old dog in need of some new tricks. The only thing I see on the horizon seems to be MMO this and FPS that and there's really only a few ways to mix them up, WoW and Crysis are the gold standards for their respective genres right now, and I'm terribly bored with Crysis and I've given up my WoW addiction so on the PC I'm left with games that seem sub-par by comparison and everytime something new comes along it barely does anything to shake up the formula. On the other hand, I have some great games on my consoles like MGS4, GTAIV, Warhawk, Uncharted, Crackdown, Dead Rising, R&C Future and so many others that the PC hasn't even tried to emulate. And the consoles keep getting great exclusives every month, even if they're not extremely, earthshatteringly innovative, they're still great games that are a lot of fun to play if even for a rent, the last great game I remember being released exclusively for the PC was Sins of a Solar Empire which came out over 4 months ago.
Ok, with that rant out of the way, there are some extremely good looking games headed exclusively for the PC later in the year and Spore is at the top of my list, but that leaves about a 6 month dry period in which the PC received no love from developers. I'm not a seasonal gamer, I prefer to play throughout the year and not just during the holidays when I would actually prefer to spend the time with my friends and family, so a release calendar that keeps a steady flow throughout the year would be preferable to hitting me with 12 great games in a little over a month's time.
To conclude, PC gaming is not dead, but it has gotten extremely stale in the past couple of years when compared to it's console brethren and in my eyes that's a big problem, and I hope there's a fix in the near future or I may wind up saving myself some cash and just play on consoles from now on.
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