I really have to fear for the future of gaming. When I made predictions of how the industry would change this generation I'd say they have been fairly accurate so far, however I didn't account for how blatant developers would be about their profit increasing methods.

Dragon Age is a good game, but you have to admit it is beyond cheeky what they did with DLC. Most developers hide the fact that they cut content out of the game in order to sell it back to the player later. Dragon Age actually has characters in the release that tell you to buy DLC in order to complete the quest, it was obvious the game was designed with the intention to exclude content for additional milking. It doesn't help either that Modern Warfare 2 reportedly already has the DLC on the disk, purchasing it only unlocks what the player already has installed.

These methods are beyond ridiculous but are becoming acceptable ways of acquiring additional money by the games industry. They get away with it because gullible consumers pay for it, they spend millions on DLC; which only encourages this activity. This generation is frighteningly becoming about paying more for less, it is only a matter of time before someone really pushes the bar as to what is acceptable. I don't know what that may be; but I feel we are only at the beginning of DLC being exploited.

This is happening far too quickly, I didn't expect desperate measures of increasing returns like this until the next generation. It is depressing to ponder what else will change in gaming by the next generation, will the industry be recognisable to gamers today? It is hard to be optimistic when the current generation feels largely inferior to the previous one, technology has advanced but the industry feels like it is getting increasingly worse as it goes down this unsustainable path.

I expect we will hit the cost wall at some point, forcing the industry to rethink gaming. However how much are we expected to put up with before then?

I saw a video on YouTube talking about the platform war, he pretty much summed it up as being people with post purchase anxiety trying to justify that they made the correct purchase decision. Whether or not that is the case I didn't attempt to consider, what I thought about was how PC gaming fit into that picture of the system wars.

You know what? It doesn't fit.

If you're a informed rig builder the closet thing you get to post purchase anxiety is if you upgraded at the right time, outside of that the only choice concerns is what games to play. There is no worries about game selection because everything you could play before changing your hardware still works, only better. PC gaming has a massive game library spanning decades, most of it doesn't need special backwards compatibility care; and for the ones that do there is software and services available to you.

I'm not concerned about getting value out of my hardware purchases because every component I use for gaming will also improve the performance of my day to day tasks. Even GPUs have a noteworthy impact on my day to day performance such as Vista 3D interface acceleration, Folding@Home GPU performance, DVD & Blu-ray hardware acceleration and even GPU accelerated transcoding when I'm converting something for my media player or YouTube.

So when you think about it PC gamers are in a pretty comfortable position regarding platform choices. Our game selection doesn't get reset every generation, our gaming orientated hardware purchases have multiple day to day applications and we are not reliant on a company like Sony or Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf on what we can do with our PC.

It makes you wonder why PC gaming is even in the platform war, it just keeps doing its thing regardless of who wins or loses the gaming platform war each generation.