Peter Molyneux, chief of Lionhead Studios, told game blog Shacknews last week that he thinks the PC is becoming a casual gaming machine — an anathema to hardcore PC gamers everywhere. And last month, Epic's Cliff Bleszinkski said PC gaming was in "disarray."

A huge selling PC game is in the hundreds of thousands, a console game is in the millions. Crysis, the biggest PC FPS exclusive this year sold 83,000 units in it's first month, Halo 3 sold 5 million copies.

These evolutions (and my frustration to upgrade) caused me to finally accept FPS (my main time waster in the video game world outside of RPG's) on consoles, and love them with many hours clocked in CoD4, The Orange Box, Resistance, etc.

Part 4 - Arr matey, the water's fine

Not only has the console industry adapted and evolved to handle games we would not normally have played on consoles, it is more hardened to the perils of piracy. Pirating games on the PC is as simple as a patch, on a console you generally have to modify your hardware, most people don't want to cross that line.

Part 5 - I see a rainbow!

All is not lost though, the PC gaming industry has some aces in it's sleeve, Maxis (EA), Valve (Half Life/Steam) and Blizzard (WoW, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2) These companies all say the PC gaming industry is just fine — and it is — for them:

Valve has more then 1.1 million concurrent steam users, all the time. They are selling games and media and being very successful. EA's Sims series has dominated top 10 best selling lists for over 10 years.

World of Warcraft counts 10 million active subscribers — each paying 15 bucks a month. That's a lot of gold. Age of Conan has already amassed 700,000 subscribers as well.

StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 will probably cause resurgence in PC sales and a smart vendor (Dell, HP, Asus, ACER) would be smart to design a $400-$500 PC or laptop that could run these games.

Part 6 - Is it over yet?

Wrap up by discussing general thoughts on the PC gaming industry based on our discussions and ask final thoughts on the PC industry.

Please be sure to stop by the chat room as we do take questions posted there. If you missed the show, you can download it from the archive — also subscribe to the RSS feed.

Be sure to tune in at 9:30 PM EST at BlogTalkRadio. However, we have a special time for Tuesday, July 15. We will start at 8:30 PM EST because we have a lot of E3 2008 news to discuss!