The only thing that's dying is big budgeted action and RPG exclusives. PC gaming has moved into it's own comfortable niche and it's doing better than ever there.
Big budgeted mainstream exclusives were killing the things I loved on this platform. The trend started around HL1's release and cultimated in HL2's premiere. 2004 was the height of this trend, we got awful lot of big budgeted exclusive that year, the problem was that they killed pretty much every genre that wasn't FPS and RTS. Throw in some rare RPG here and there and that was all PCgaming was getting. Genres like adventure, wargames, simulators, 4Xes and many others were either already near extinction or quickly heading towards it.
Niche games are great, but they just can 't compete for gamer's and press' attention with those big blockbuster exclusives. So they were dying out quickly.
The move of all those PC giants to consoles has created awful lot of breathing space on PC. This is one of the main reasons why we've seen such ressurgence of niche genres in recent few years. DD helped also, but the ressurgence is visible also in retail too. Without the need to compete with giants smaller devs can easily survive on the market. That's why not only so many new devs are being born, but also why we've seen so many veteran PC designers go back to PC gaming, after spending decade or so on retirement.
PC gaming right now is quickly turning into modernized version of what it was in 80s and early 90s. Sure, it would be great to have both niche and big budgeted exclusives, but realisticaly the later can't exist without hurting the former to some degree.
To me the current situation is a very welcome and healthy compromise. We get amazing niche development, which regularly provides us with hardcore exclusives.
And on high production values front we still do get many of them, sure most are RTSes and MMOs, but ocassionaly we will also get some RPG or action game. And if that's not enough you can always turn to PC versions of multiplats. Sure, they aren't designed perfectly to work on PC, but most of the time they are high quality and very enjoyable to play on PC, which just didn't happen 10 years ago. We do of course also get some crappy port from time to time, but even it is most of the time playable and there are also cases when console-centric games have their best versions on PC. If somebody would tell me 8-10 years ago that late port from consoles can sometimes actualy be the best version I would think they are completely crazy.
