Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that despite everyone’s talk of "the gaming industry" as a single entity, console and computer gaming have always been two fundamentally different propositions, even 20 years ago. Console games have always been comparatively expensive to produce, and hence more expensive to buy, and so they’ve generally had to play a lot safer – simple, easy-to-understand concepts and names familiar to the man in the street (and more importantly, to the man in the street’s mum, since it was she who actually paid for most console games until at least the mid-90s). Computers, on the other hand, were cheap to develop for and publish on, so developers could afford to take risks on much more off-the-wall gaming concepts (also helped by the flexibility of having a keyboard to control matters with), providing the crucial influx of new ideas which kept the whole business alive and vibrant and made people want to play games in the first place. (Of course, as the cost of development has converged over the last few years, that originality has accordingly gone out of the window to be replaced by a thousand rewrites of FIFA and Tomb Raider, but that’s another, much more depressing, story altogether.)

Now, of course, you know all this already. Why, you might be wondering, am I wasting your time by pointing it out again? And the answer is, because it’s all about to change.

For the first time in the history of gaming, true convergence looks like it’s about to become a reality. The lines between console and computer gaming, already quite blurred, are, it seems, about to completely disappear. And the reason for this is that the PC, the last home computer, is finally about to do the decent thing, and die out as a leading-edge games platform. You can cheer now, if you like.

The thing is, until now, the fundamentally different natures of console and computer gaming ensured that both markets would always survive. If you wanted to play certain types of game (fun, accessible, exciting platform games, or multi-player games involving people in the same room, for example), you HAD to buy a console. If you wanted to play certain other types of game (complex, involving strategy games, "realistic" flight sims, games with more than four players at a time), you HAD to have a PC. The PC did things that consoles simply couldn’t do, and what’s more it did them more prettily. If you wanted the absolute state-of-the-art in gaming technology, the PC always lead the way. That era is now at an end.

But why? Surely nothing’s REALLY changed? Well, try these:

1. The DC and PS2 both do or will offer easy access to the Internet, with all the (previously PC-only) implications that brings with regard to online gaming, Web access, downloadable add-ons etc. Of course, set-top boxes have tried and failed to do this in the past, but without the established gaming muscle of the big names behind them, they didn’t stand a chance.

2. One of Intel’s leading chip scientists recently gave an interview to the New York Times in which he detailed the physical "wall" which is set to bring a dramatic halt to the days of PC processor speed growth. It seems likely that the next generation of CPUs (the 800MHz – 1GHz range) will be the last – according to the Intel boffin, it’s simply not physically possible to get silicon-based chips to go any faster. (For highly convincing-sounding reasons which went right over my head – check the story out yourself for more detail.)

3. These two facts alone deal a shattering blow to almost every advantage PC gaming has over its console equivalent. While consoles with their dedicated architecture and arrays of custom chips have far more flexibility to expand their technological capabilities, the PC is first going to be caught up and then left comprehensively behind in the graphics and sound stakes, (and it’ll no longer be necessary to have a degree in server management in order to set up a simple network game of Quake 4). Remember, the PC needs vastly more raw power as it is to match the performance of consoles – it wasn’t until P200s with 3D cards became standard that PC games could stand up to the performance of the 33MHz Playstation. Theoretically, then, to keep up with the PS2, even allowing for the current improvements in graphics-card technology, a PC would need a clock speed of somewhere around 3GHz, which isn’t going to happen. (And anyway, when graphics cards cost nearly as much as a new console, why not just buy the console and save yourself all the pain of PC upgrading?)

4. PCs are, of course, really really horrible. With no reason to put up with their hideous "quirks" and vicious user-hate any more, gamers will abandon them in droves for better machines at a tenth of the price. Console games are already hugely safer, more profitable and far less trouble for publishers, so they won't need much persuading to jump the PC ship altogether. Many publishers (and, especially, developers) have been desperate for an excuse to do so for years.

5. The conclusion, then, is all but inevitable. The PC will completely die as a leading-edge games platform. There'll still be a niche market for the hardcore spod and his impenetrable "strategy" games with lots of orcs and colons in the titles, and the bigger console hits will be ported across in slightly less-fun, more-crashing, 3GB-of-your-hard-drive-swallowing incarnations, but hardly anybody will care very much, and PC owners will become the equivalent of beardy real-ale bores for ever and ever.

Now, of course, there are arguments to be made against this conclusion. For example, some of the people I spoke to while researching this piece made the reasonable point that since there will always be millions of PCs being used for work and domestic purposes, people will want to play games on them. On closer examination, though, the theory doesn’t stand up. For one thing, if playing games on a console is better, then why would you want to risk all your valuable home accounting information or whatever by installing some buggy, system-wrecking game on your hard drive? Surely, the dream is to have the PC happily chugging away at all the tedious work, not straining itself and hence not crashing all the time, and then when you fancy a game of something, decant to your comfy sofa, big TV and state-of-the-art console?

Other people will tell you that the sort of games popular on PC will just never work on a console (some of them offering as proof the "intensity" of locking yourself in a room and playing Championship Manager or Tiberian Sun for solid hours at a time). But with keyboards, mice and hard drives about to be standard items of console hardware, why not? What’s the difference? Personally, I was 10 times more glued to the screen playing Mario 64 and Goldeneye than I ever was with Command & Conquer. And C&C, football management games, RPGs and detailed sims – once exclusively the PC’s domain - are now almost as popular in the console charts as they are on computer. A glance at the forthcoming releases planned for DC and PS2 shows no shortage of complex, sophisticated "PC-style" games.