Consoles were perpetuated by the game industry's want of money. They decided that the only way they'd get cash from tweens, teens and twenty-somethings was to lock down the hardware. To bait them, they offered kit that rivaled mid-spec PCs (at least in some metrics) at a price that meant they be taking a loss on each sale. They figured they could play Lexmark's game--cheap kit, absurdly expensive ink--and make up for it selling games. Evidently their plan worked.
Console owners of course are now realizing the true nature of the trap which has been laid for them. The hardware actually isn't all that great--it is just a low-spec PC that happens to have a decent GPU after all. The ink costs a fortune. Hardware refreshes don't happen very that often, and when they do the old titles often won't run on them.
For PC gamers who didn't drink the Kool-aid, we've gotten a mixed bag from it all. The big game houses treat us the wayward step-child. They cater to the consoles, and occasionally throw us a few console ports complete with all the compromises necessitated by its heritage. This however opened a vacuum that indie dev-houses are filling reasonably well. The graphics generally aren't meriting the high-spec card(s) in our rigs, but we get to reclaim notions like novelty, plots, sophisticated play, user-created features and content, and most importantly the price-value proposition.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
