I don't think that's necessarily true. Water will reach its own level so to speak, if a developer releases a game that is far too much for a majority of gamers to run, those gamers won't buy the game and it won't sell. Obviously that also isn't always necessarily true, but enough terribly optimized games have released recently to be met with 40% rating on Steam that I'd like to think this is the case. Are some developers going to do it anyway? Absolutely, but that's true regardless. I think that no matter what, indie developers will always tend to keep their games lightweight either by principle or by design necessity, and bigger game studios would also sorta get the message and keep their games reasonable. With obvious exceptions... goddamn 400 GB games these days.

The hardware is only a part of it. A keyboard and mouse provide infinite controller configurations. How anyone can play a shooter without them has always puzzled me.

You do realize controller options exist right? (On PCs)

Not to mention it forces AAA titles to actually optimize their shit.

Bless your heart.

too much piracy on the PC gaming market.

Nah, it's not been about piracy for a while, and even when it was about piracy it wasn't just about piracy. PC development is inherently harder because there isn's a locked hardware target, so compatibility is difficult and expensive to service. And for a long time, PC sales were just much, much lower than console sales.

Both of those things have changed for a while, partially through the reduction of options in the PC market, partially through PC hardware manufacturers increasingly doing the job of servicing big games with dedicated drivers and partially through Valve becoming a closed, DRM-enabled platform more comparable to a console. You can chart that process, and it's long, difficult and full of ambiguity.

I have lots of thoughts on "game quality" as well, but it's hard to know what people even mean with that sometimes (bugs? design? content?). In general games today are... kinda great. Last year in particular was mind blowing. That said, games can get huge, expensive and complicated now in ways they couldn't really a few decades ago. But it's also true that games are more varied. Every game in 1994 looked more or less like every other game because the hardware could only do so many things. Today you can play retro 8-bit games AND effectively CG film-quality narrative experiences on the same hardware. It's crazy how expansive, varied and creative games have become.

Even if one thinks quality has gone down, though, it clearly isn't because of consoles.

I think there are too many big franchises shaping the market. Some of them steer bad business fixations (see EA riding the licensed sports game MTX horse to hell) and most encourage a lot of me-too design (do we need another battle royale?)

Consoles worsen that with the Gilette model problem. Since most are sold at a loss, the vendor has to make it up on games, and constrain who releases software to those who will pay/revenue share for access. A galaxy of small devs and clever designs won't even get past the secretary to see the guy who quotes the rate card.

To be fair, a huge appeal of a console for devs was the promise of a uniform experience. Every Xbox Series X Bellgrande With Chives is supposed to be practically equivalent, so you don't have to worry about someone filing a ticket that the game runs weird when ran on an Athlon 64 FX-60 paired with a pre-production Intel Battlemage card.

The graphics card has become the single most expensive part in a gaming PC by far, it's ridiculous. Because of how crazy nvidia has been with their pricing, and AMD being happy to match them in pricing, I'm fine sticking with my eight year old PC. Most games I play are older anyway. I think eventually integrated GPUs will be considered "good enough" that most PCs won't be using a dedicated graphics card, just like how dedicated sound cards aren't the norm anymore. The downside would be having to get a new CPU to have a new GPU as well, but with even low-end graphics cards being ridiculously expensive, you'd basically be getting a free CPU upgrade with your GPU upgrade.

Pretty much this. Consoles are incredibly good at establishing a baseline (although Nintendo's anemic Switch hardware can stay out of the conversation), and giving you a pretty decent idea of the sort of performance you'd see out of a lower-middle tier gaming PC. You can then scale performance from there without running into the "will it run Crysis" issue.

I do agree that EXCLUSIVES shouldn't really be a thing, but...consoles are not necessarily a bad thing.

I think it is silly too, but not for your reasoning but, come on bro, it is like if you said let's go ban selling OS in PCs altogether, you will need to install it yourself, that is the same sentiment for consoles vs PC, people like plug & play devices, and PC sadly are not there yet (some devices like the Steam Deck have a closer approach though).

This is a great point. If you want to know what the target hardware becomes if you remove consoles from the picture you can go look at the Steam survey. The typical gaming PC is a 6 core Intel machine with a Gforce 3060 and 16 gigs of Ram pushing a 1080p monitor and running Windows 10. And that's up from the old top GPU, the 1650, which currently sits at number three on the charts.

That, you'll notice, is worse than the current spec for modern consoles. It's also why the huge PC hits in history have looked like LoL, World of Warcraft or Minecraft, not like Crysis and Cyberpunk 2077.

Consoles are why you get Alan Wake 2 on PC instead of the Alan Wake model from Fortnite.

pc upgrading pyramid scheme,

Lol no. The days of needing to upgrade your PC more than once every 7-10 years have been gone for a while