When would you say the PC was in its prime?
I think PC gaming is still very much alive, people play PC games but it seems piracy is stunting sales figures.

What do you think?

I'd say it is past it's prime. When there used to be all the shareware games, all these titles from ID soft, oh man...
But yeah PC has to stay, mostly in my opinion for MMORPGs, FPS and RTS, wich are unplayable/hardly enjoyable on a console.

I think the pc is evolving as a gaming platform.
I think games such as MMO and RTS will be dominant on the PC, sicne they would work as well or even at ll on a console. Other type of games I think we will rarley see on pc. FPS the jury is out on.... the pc has the advantage of having the most precise gaming control, the mouse. Nothing beats it.
The PC dominance pretty much ended when the point and click adventures died....

PC is going stronger than ever, especially with the likes of Steam and such

PC gaming is still going strong the only problem is oversaturation of bad games. Don't let a few bad apples spoil the bunch.

However PC gaming is not the most economically conservative market.

When I look at PC games all I see is a sea of The Sims, MMOs, RTS, and FPS games. Most of it is just too cookie cutter to hold my attention.

In all fairness though They really are the core staples of the PC market

I think that although pc gaming is still popular, a lot of people have been alienated just because of the rate at which everything moves today. You have to update your pc quite regularly if you wish to keep up with a lot of the new games and this is quite costly. I remember when I used to be quite a heavy PC gamer but the issue of updating my pc's spec was the main thing that made me switch to console only when new games come out. It simply just cost too much and I needed to do it too freqeuntly!

Although things have always been increasing in terms of what the pc is capable of I think that it has increased more in the last 2 years than any other time before. A couple of years ago the type of machine that many would see as "obsolete" or "outdated" by now was seen as a top of the range machine.

I know Geoff claims that there are not many good pc games out at the moment so I was wondering if anyone agrees with him as I only keep up with the big releases on pc (eg Crysis, COD4 etc)

Yeah there is that. Sad thing is thought that I'm going to buy my new PC it'll be to play the games that I've missed out over the years. That and Warhammer online

PC is THE best platform for RTS, FPS and MMO. I don't care about MMO, but I fuckin love RTS games and FPS. CoD4 is so awesome at the PC, haven't played it on a console yet but I guess it's good there too. But PC really has the best controls for FPS and RTS.

The bad thing about PC is all the pirating... Scares developers away since they won't make that much of a buck because of it.

And another thing that bugs me is the fact that with alot of games for the PC I have to freakin buy 10 copies of a game for a single LAN party. It's ridiculous! Or I can pirate... Which is the only way out then, since I don't feel like buying ten copies of CoD4 to my friends. I bought CoD4, I could pass the keycode and CD out but that's a "danger" for me. My keycode gets "stolen" and I'll have problem with my onlineplay... Why can't all, ALL!, PC games have some way to pass the game disc around and just install a LAN version of the game? So I can pass out my copy of CoD4 to my friends, but not my CD key. They start installation and choose "LAN installation" or something. And then they get the multiplayer part of the game, fully patchable and all maps available, but for LAN only. No SP, no online. LAN only. That'd be something that would make piracy decrease a bit... I guess.

And it would be very convenient (AND AWESOME!!!)

But anyways... PC gaming is awesome.

You basically summed up the reason I got an xbox 360 this year. I couldn't handle upgrading my PC as often as I needed to just to barely get by at minimum settings. I plan on getting back into PC gaming sooner or later, unless xbox plans on supporting mouse and keyboard controls

Oh just for clarification - I don't think pc gaming is bad or anything like that! PC gaming is in fact awesome! I was just stating one of the reasons why many people have switched to consoles but if you do have a pc with the top spec then it must be heaven!

I would be a dream come true.
Sadly, my laptop can't play Portal, Team Fortess 2 or Half Life 2: EP2.
And anything else made in the last 2 years as well.

PC gaming will be around for quite some time even if it's just for ease of modding. As long as engines are produced people will want to mod them and that is quite a bit more difficult on consoles.

I've recently got back into PC gaming, TF2 in particular. I think if the PC hardware had more of a console-like standard, similar to AMDs initiative, that would help. Alot.
If upgrading a new graphics card was as easy as plugging in a USB drive, the market would be made much more accessible, and make this kind of gaming a little less specialised. And when developers create largely unoptimized, not-so-scale-able, visually OTT games like crysis, they shouldn't moan when sales aren't what they expect.

Long passed.

A fundamental problem is that PC Gaming is no longer economical. A new graphics card will run you the cost of a Wii easy. Toss in another hundred and you could grab a 360, incidentally, a hundred dollars is probably how much it'll cost you to throw in enough RAM to run these new games. Even after you've secured yourself a monster PC rig there's no guarantee the games will run on your PC without a slew of crashes, bugs, and glitches. I'm still waiting on a patch to fix a PC title that was released three months ago.

On top of that, the titles being released exclusively on the PC aren't going to be turning your head. Now given, if you're an RTS or MMO nut, you have to stick with the PC. Though the quality of RTS titles has certainly been plunging of late as well. Beyond those two genres though, what've you got exclusively on the PC? Very little. And not much of that very little exclusive content is worth wasting time on.

It may be, I wouldn't know since I've just recently gotten into it with spectacular games like Bioshock, Portal, Half-Life 2 and it's Episodes and Team Fortress 2.

I miss the days of shareware shooters like Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage, and Shadow Assassian. Now it just seems every game that is released on PC is also released on a console as well, I can't really think of any breakthrough PC games that have come out in the past few months. It's sad.

I used to collect those demo discs from PC gamer, the interactive ones, with Coconut Monkey.

I miss those days.

Right now I'd say gaming as a whole is kind of in a stand-still.

The industry is booming but the creativity and innovation in titles is seriously lacking; what we see now is RTS and MMOs for the PC audience and FPS/TPS and Racing games for the consoles.

I don't really think PC gaming is dead or even past its prime; who knows if what we've seen so far was really the prime? What I will say however is that the shareware days were great for gaming and if we could make a return to something like that it I think it would help the industry a lot.

Just my two cents though.

I also want to point out that Master of Orion 2 kicks ass.