Seeing how this game is being developed with the PC being its primary platform, it can only mean good things for PC gaming.
 
Now I am no console hater (I own both 360 and PS3 and have dozens of games for both), but I grew up as a PC gamer. And seeing the gaming industry lean towards consoles and leaving the PC to suffer crappy ports of good games saddened me to say the least. 
 
Now it seems the tides are turning. This game is being developed primarily on PC and it is the consoles who will be getting the watered down port. And from the looks of it they are really taking advantage of newer PC hardware. The game looks and sounds AMAZING.  Also when I saw the WASD prompt on the recent trailer, it made me all feel warm and fuzzy inside as I knew that this was in fact being demonstrated on the PC :D 
 
But the real question is; What does this game mean for the future of PC gaming? If it is a success will other developers follow DICE's example and bring the PC back to proper form? I hope so.
 
Discuss.

PC gaming is climbing in general. The revenues, compared to 2009, are up 20% so there's no doubt the digital purchase model is proving fruitful.  Think the only thing that hinders the digital market at this point is the fucked up prices you'll have to endure at some points. I mean 60 euros for MW2 and BLOPS on Steam? Really??
 
I doubt BF3 specifically will make a larger impact on sales but it would definitely setting a comforting example to other developers that the PC market is out there and going strong. 

"Also when I saw the WASD prompt on the recent trailer, it made me all feel warm and fuzzy inside"

Well im buying a whole new pc setup just for this. I lot of my BF2 friends will be also.

All I know is that when this comes out, I'll be playing it as Battlefield games were meant to be played, on a PC.

" Well im buying a whole new pc setup just for this. I lot of my BF2 friends will be also. "

I think it's a cycle we're going to come to see in future generations of gaming. As consoles reach the pinnacle of their abilities, we'll see PC games released that do things the current generation of consoles aren't near achieving. The allure of the technological leap will make the games, and the PC gaming platform, more attractive. 
 
At the origin of the next generation of consoles, they will have caught up. Then, that hardware remains stagnant and the gap in quality/ability ultimately grows to be quite noticeable.

I don't think Battlefield 3 means anything in particular for PC gaming, other than a lot of PC gamers having an awesome game to play.  I think that over the next few years the disparity between PC and consoles will become irreconcilable.  This will probably result in either games being skewed more towards one audience or the other, or in some seriously compromised ports on both platforms.  I imagine it will be a mix of both.  Then new consoles will come out and be better capable of coping with some of the advances made in the PC market, resulting in games made to be relatively comparable across platforms for awhile.
 
I don't know, whatever.

" @gamb1t said:

" Well im buying a whole new pc setup just for this. I lot of my BF2 friends will be also. "

what are you upgrading from to ? "

" @Ahmad_Metallic said:

" @gamb1t said:

" Well im buying a whole new pc setup just for this. I lot of my BF2 friends will be also. "

what are you upgrading from to ? "

i sold my old pc rig that ran all source games maxed out flawlessly, bf2 maxed out, crysis on medium settings no aa's. im building a beast machine to play battlefield3 with maxed out settings. along side with games ilke guildwars2 and diablo3 of coarse!!! but bf3 will get most playtime by far "

" @gamb1t said:

" @Ahmad_Metallic said:

" @gamb1t said:

" Well im buying a whole new pc setup just for this. I lot of my BF2 friends will be also. "

what are you upgrading from to ? "

i sold my old pc rig that ran all source games maxed out flawlessly, bf2 maxed out, crysis on medium settings no aa's. im building a beast machine to play battlefield3 with maxed out settings. along side with games ilke guildwars2 and diablo3 of coarse!!! but bf3 will get most playtime by far "

I'll be building a beast machine not sooner than a month before BF3 release. If anything I'm going to have it ready to go on release date just to have a clean PC to run from. "

Battlefield 3 should help PC hardware sales. The fact that they are implementing DX11 is really good.

" @Skar220 said:

"Also when I saw the WASD prompt on the recent trailer, it made me all feel warm and fuzzy inside"

i know.. for the last 3-4 years all ive been seeing in insider footage and demos is the fucking X and A and triangle.. seeing a WASD in a highly anticipated technically-groundbreaking AAA shooter slapped a huge grin on my face "

" @Ahmad_Metallic said:

" @Skar220 said:

"Also when I saw the WASD prompt on the recent trailer, it made me all feel warm and fuzzy inside"

i know.. for the last 3-4 years all ive been seeing in insider footage and demos is the fucking X and A and triangle.. seeing a WASD in a highly anticipated technically-groundbreaking AAA shooter slapped a huge grin on my face "

WASD is for communists!  ESDF all the way! "

Nothing really, maybe more people choose to play this on the PC and not the consoles but in order to bring the PC to it's glory days we need more than one big game to be developed mainly for the PC and untill the piracy levels won't go down I don't see why developers would choose to focus on the PC for their games.

" @gamb1t said:

" @Ahmad_Metallic said:

" @gamb1t said:

" Well im buying a whole new pc setup just for this. I lot of my BF2 friends will be also. "

what are you upgrading from to ? "

i sold my old pc rig that ran all source games maxed out flawlessly, bf2 maxed out, crysis on medium settings no aa's. im building a beast machine to play battlefield3 with maxed out settings. along side with games ilke guildwars2 and diablo3 of coarse!!! but bf3 will get most playtime by far "

I'll be building a beast machine not sooner than a month before BF3 release. If anything I'm going to have it ready to go on release date just to have a clean PC to run from. "

I am saying this as someone who probably spend the most gaming hours on the PC in 2010. I think BF3 nothing really means for PC gaming. PC gamers will still play it on PC, console gamers will still play this on a console. You will not move people over, or bring novice players to the PC. People who rarely buy games (BF2 hardcore players I imagine) will buy a game thats it. That the PC is the lead platform only means that we are approaching the end of a console life cycle. Even primary console titles nowadays suffer from texture pop-ins and bad framerate. Also, I hate playing shooters on a PC. I can not work this keyboard and mouse thing. I heard Jeff saying in the podcast, that first-person shooters were THE breakthrough genre for the PC. I suppose this is an american thing. Here in Europe we do know those Counterstrike kids, but the average hardcore gamer (around 30?) would say: "PC, yeah, thats were I play strategy games on." And I think that is the route PC gaming needs to take. Although you might beg to differ, but using keyboard & mouse to control a shooter brings nothing to the table to make PC gaming relevant. Consider on the other hand trying to control a RTS game with a gamepad. PC gaming does not need games that you (more or less) can play on on consoles as well, but exclusive games with high production value in unique genres with better mass appeal yet deep mechanics. At the moment only Blizzard makes those.

" I am saying this as someone who probably spend the most gaming hours on the PC in 2010. I think BF3 nothing really means for PC gaming. PC gamers will still play it on PC, console gamers will still play this on a console. You will not move people over, or bring novice players to the PC. People who rarely buy games (BF2 hardcore players I imagine) will buy a game thats it. That the PC is the lead platform only means that we are approaching the end of a console life cycle. Even primary console titles nowadays suffer from texture pop-ins and bad framerate. Also, I hate playing shooters on a PC. I can not work this keyboard and mouse thing. I heard Jeff saying in the podcast, that first-person shooters were THE breakthrough genre for the PC. I suppose this is an american thing. Here in Europe we do know those Counterstrike kids, but the average hardcore gamer (around 30?) would say: "PC, yeah, thats were I play strategy games on." And I think that is the route PC gaming needs to take. Although you might beg to differ, but using keyboard & mouse to control a shooter brings nothing to the table to make PC gaming relevant. Consider on the other hand trying to control a RTS game with a gamepad. PC gaming does not need games that you (more or less) can play on on consoles as well, but exclusive games with high production value in unique genres with better mass appeal yet deep mechanics. At the moment only Blizzard makes those. "

Battlefield 3 should help PC hardware sales. The fact that they are implementing DX11 is really good.

" @Jayross

Battlefield 3 should help PC hardware sales. The fact that they are implementing DX11 is really good.

Yes that's what I think as well. Crysis push the hardware limits, sure, but nothing sells hardware like a multiplayer game where everyone want the best experience. Especially since Bf3 will require dx10 or 11 to even play. I bought new hardware around the Bf2 launch and also when Bad Company 2 came around. Me, and pretty much all of my friends, are planning some serious upgrading this fall. "

 @SeriouslyNow said:

" @Wuddel said:

" I am saying this as someone who probably spend the most gaming hours on the PC in 2010. I think BF3 nothing really means for PC gaming. PC gamers will still play it on PC, console gamers will still play this on a console. You will not move people over, or bring novice players to the PC. People who rarely buy games (BF2 hardcore players I imagine) will buy a game thats it. That the PC is the lead platform only means that we are approaching the end of a console life cycle. Even primary console titles nowadays suffer from texture pop-ins and bad framerate. Also, I hate playing shooters on a PC. I can not work this keyboard and mouse thing. I heard Jeff saying in the podcast, that first-person shooters were THE breakthrough genre for the PC. I suppose this is an american thing. Here in Europe we do know those Counterstrike kids, but the average hardcore gamer (around 30?) would say: "PC, yeah, thats were I play strategy games on." And I think that is the route PC gaming needs to take. Although you might beg to differ, but using keyboard & mouse to control a shooter brings nothing to the table to make PC gaming relevant. Consider on the other hand trying to control a RTS game with a gamepad. PC gaming does not need games that you (more or less) can play on on consoles as well, but exclusive games with high production value in unique genres with better mass appeal yet deep mechanics. At the moment only Blizzard makes those. "

FPS games are definitely not an American thing.  Three of the the leading FPS dev teams come from Europe  -  DICE, Crytek and CroTeam and all of their franchise FPS brands launched and sold heavily primarliy on PC.  Their successes exist purely because Europe fell in love with the FPS genre along with the rest of the world and that love affair was directly tied to the PC.  There's also a really strong connection between the European Demoscene, FPS companies (both DICE and CroTeam, let alone Remedy/FUTURE CREW) and 3D GPU technology too - with 3D libraries and hardware coming directly out of Europe at height of the PC FPS sales peak (BitBoyz.Oy among others) and all of that comes from the European love affair with the FPS genre.  The FPS Genre was the breakthrough genre for PC but also for the games industry overall.  Without FPS games we wouldn't have the number of engines (it all started with Wolfenstein 3D really and later Quake) or middleware (Physics, Sound and so forth) we do now and those two are underpinning every other genre including RTS.  Every single game is a 3D game these days, even those in 2D with sprites - all of them driven by 3D Engine technology and a lot of them using engines commonly associated with FPS games.  Your hardcore gamer in Europe knows exactly where the PC stands in terms of the FPS genre.  You may not be as hardcore as you think you might be. Now, your pro console and anti-FPS biases aside, it may well be true that you feel that PC gaming isn't at its best when it swims in the same waters as console products but record sales of Nvidia and ATI high end GPUs (which likely far exceed console sales over the same period) show that there are many people who do want to push the limits of resolutiion and effects beyond the console capability even when they are left to play ports.   "

Depends on how much this will get people to play PC games. Yeah a lot of you here are upgrading, but that 's not what will help PC gaming. What would help is people switching from consoles to PC gaming, which I don't see happening based on 1 game that you can play on consoles (if not optimized). Buying a $800 PC because of one game is likely unrealistic. It's far more likely that a PC exclusive like Starcraft or Diablo is much more likely to "revitalize" PC gaming. However, if devs see a lot of people buying this on PC (as a PC lead) they may be encouraged. I still don't know if this is a certain thing because Battlefield is a well-known PC franchise, so trying to do it with a new IP or a former console lead series may not have the sales effect publishers hope as consumers either wouldn't know about the boss-ness of the PC version or wouldn't care.

It will be a good game but will have absolutely no effect on PC gaming as a whole.

"  Think the only thing that hinders the digital market at this point is the fucked up prices you'll have to endure at some points. I mean 60 euros for MW2 and BLOPS on Steam? Really?"

What would really help PC gaming would be if publishers would make a huge switch to digital distribution and cut the prices half ... yeah you heard me! ... let me finish my thought first. Think of this: 
 
A major AAA title, lets just say Battlefield 3, is released. They do not just release it the same day as a DD version, they release it one week early. Not only that, they cut the price half to 30€. A week only  
and half the price? Im sure that the overall revenue they would get would be bigger than anything they get with 60€. As soon as one major publisher realizes its smart to do that there will be a huge sales 
leap in PC gaming. Will that kill piracy? No, never. As long as people can get stuff "for free" they will do so. But it will give them several reasons not to pirate a game. And those that make the switch 
to a payed version will make all the difference. 
 
When it comes to BF3, its nice to see that PC is the lead plattform ... and tbh, I too had a nice warm feeling when I saw WASD in that gameplay video :)