You can make a pretty strong case that PC gaming is dying. You can look at Desktop sales to get a pretty good feel as to why Blizzard wont be making WoW2.
PC sales to drop by 6% in 2014 | Computerworld
PCs lumber towards the technological graveyard | Technology | The Guardian
The fact that anyone would make something as expensive as an MMO is pretty amazing to me. EQN if its released within a year or two will be at the dying edge.
Well, there's probably a few points to be made about that. One, outside of the extreme edge of gaming (4k) just about everything can be played on earlier iterations of current hardware. CPUs are still overpowering standard game use by a large margin, and applications in general haven't jumped in requirements by a noticeable amount in at least two years. A mid-range (200) card from 3 years ago will still play everything at 1080p with minor tweeks. Ram has been cheap forever, and even with only 4g you can still do just about everything, as 4k was the average shipping size a few years back. Hard Drive space has been cheap for a decade, and even with most applications starting to balloon in overall space, finding room for those apps has never been an issue. So basically, even if you are a hardcore gamer (and lets face it, the majority of MMOs aren't running at Crysis 3 specs) your equipment from 2-3 years ago is still more than sufficient. And if you are a standard consumer who doesn't play technologically taxing games, your equipment from 5-6 years ago is still sufficient. As has been pointed out, we are getting pretty close to the limits of how much power we can physically cram into hardware, and application/game designers aren't aiming for the $10,000 system builder that is pushing those limits. With that in mind, there isn't really a need to upgrade if you already had a good machine from a couple of years back, hence a decline in overall sales.
Two, take point one and combine it with the second article focusing on a company using iPads has a name "iCore." I mean, not to say that isn't a direct apple shill or anything, but it looks biased as hell from outside. But that aside, the current longevity of pc equipment means that they already have quite an entrenched pc/laptop base, while the tablet market grows because they don't need to purchase more pcs or laptops. Especially when it comes to a business angle. Aside from video editors or graphics artists that require loads of horsepower (whom would be purchasing those 10k rigs I mentioned earlier anyway) 99% of business functions can easily be handled on much less powerful hardware than current designs supply. Even 300$ E-machine type shitboxes have 4 gigs of ram and something that looks like a quad core processor. That type of power simply isn't in high demand for the -vast- majority of office work, and unless the home-owners are doing high end gaming, it is still probably more than enough for their needs.
Three, I would hazard that while mobile technology and pad technology are definitely growing, that the costs of many consumers and businesses are shifting from upgrading their workstations/hardware towards upgrading network infrastructure. Netflix will run happily on a 10 year old machine, but if you don't have the right connection, you'll be streaming in 8bit blocks. A new PC won't help that in the vast majority of cases, but a better wireless solution or higher throughput cable/dsl/satellite connection certainly will.
Basically, using the sales of PCs/laptops as a descriptor of waning interest in online gaming just isn't a good metric today. When we were having giant leaps in technology 7-8 years ago, sure. But now? Not so much.
