Who killed PC gaming?

Hint: the market.

Industry Gamers has published an opinion piece that's marginally provocative, even if we've heard all the arguments before. The thesis isn't that PC games are headed for extinction; it deals rather with the undeniable facts that console games get the lion's share of shelf space in retail outlets, and PC versions often get second-class status with multi-platform releases.

Here's the list (in reverse order), with links to individual pages:

#7 - Rise of laptops
#6 - DRM
#5 - Piracy
#4 - Hardware issues
#3 - Xbox 360
#2 - Windows Vista
#1 - Microsoft

There's nothing particularly controversial about any of it, but it's interesting for the fact that all sectors of the industry are held to account. That's refreshing in a debate that usually devolves into finger-pointing between the various factions. Personally, I think piracy should have been rated higher (maybe #2), but there's no doubt that Microsoft has failed PC gamers on multiple fronts, and I'm glad to see the emphasis on their culpability.

So, I'll pose this question to IUN's readers: what items would be on your list, in what order, and what items would expunge?

UPDATE: in the comments, the author (or one of them) offers some additional exposition:

Firstly, I invite everyone to read my first paragraph- PC gaming is not dying but changing in form and there's serious money to be made with online titles; we know and acknowledge that. What we're talking about is a general tendency over the past decade that's not opinion, it's fact. Multiplatform releases on PC don't usually do "pretty damned fine" all of the charts say that the consoles are the lead platforms on sales in the vast majority of cases. Certain sales numbers are certainly lost in the nebulous void of direct downloads that nobody reports, but that's still the way things are. You concentrate on simultaneous releases smithton, failing to mention that when games are ported to the PC later, they typically do very, very poorly. There's tons of games, but there always has been on PC because there's no licensing fee. When id talks about how PC only releases aren't enough to support their games anymore, when Epic purposefully keeps Gears of War 2 from PCs, when GTA IV (the latest in a franchise that used to come to PC first) releases for PC several months after PS3/Xbox 360, that's what we mean about core PC gaming dying. There are still the passionate fans out there, but the numbers suggest those numbers are shrinking.

Firstly, I'd invite him to read the title of his own article. If you lead with the sensational verbiage, expect people to ignore your subsequent disclaimers.

Secondly, the point he makes is absolutely correct, although it got lost in the main article: the console version outsells the PC version in the majority of multi-platform releases. Forget about who's to blame ... that's the market.