We`ve already talked about how piracy is one of the big problems in the PC gaming world but Tim Sweeney (the mind behind Epic`s Unreal engine) has a different take on the issue. In an interview with TG Daily he talks about how Intel`s integrated graphics chip is killing the gaming market because it can`t handle modern games. He talks specifically about how the gap between the high end and the low end PC`s has shifted over the last decade or so:

"The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x"....."If we go back 10 years ago, the difference between the high end and the lowest end may have been a factor of 10. We could have scaled games between those two."
This is yet another reason why PC Gaming is in such an odd state right now and it`s not one that`s likely to change until PC manufacturers can start closing that gap again.