PC gaming has never been at the top. The best games have always been on the consoles.

Sony is showing off a major redesign of PlayStation Home. The site originally launched in 2008 as a virtual world and is now becoming a hub for social gaming.

The redesign is aimed at jumping on the big trend in online games: social games with free-to-play business models, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. This is the kind of gamble that Sony needs to make in order to hang on to its 23 million registered users at a time when social networks and mobile phones are stealing consumers’ attention.

The core of Home will be a Hub (pictured at top) where you can socialize with friends and immediately find game-related activities to do, director of PlayStation Home, Jack Buser (pictured), told VentureBeat. Sony has a closed beta test for the new Home right now and hopes to widen it soon.

“Right when you walk into the Hub, you’ll see a featured game and the activity board that lists everything you can do,” Buser said.

Home is evolving to become more of a platform for playing social games. The 230 titles available on Home are aimed at Home’s mostly hardcore fans, but they are lighter and more casual experiences than users would find in disk-based PlayStation 3 games. That’s a far cry from Home’s original mission in 2008 as a virtual world for gamers.

That's some serious fortune telling going on.

As soon as the new consoles are released, that graph is going to look ridiculous.

Why does the console revenue suddenly go down? Are they living under a rock? Do they not realize that Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony all have consoles essentially waiting in the wings?

EA CEO John Riccitiello said it essentially no longer matters and that consoles aren't even the dominant force in gaming today.

The very model for the way people are buying games is changing. Digital D/Ls are the future - no more box. No one wants to pay $80 for 6 hours of gaming when you can get engrossing games for free and F2Play is what the PC online is becoming.

Consoles will have to be completely rethought for them to survive. Consider that everything will be mobile gaming and that it will look as well as next gen consoles. And the PC will support 6 screens in 3D - the consoles will not be able to keep up. Many companies (like Epic) will fail.

Developers have been telling us for years (over a decade) that content for games would become cheaper and cheaper to create. However they haven't been passing on the savings to the consumer and consoles have made this worse because they rely on expensive games to underwrite the losses on the hardware.

So what can we expect to see that will be so much better than what we have now? First up, let's take a look at the rather unexciting fundamentals. With 1080p now the established standard for HDTVs, with even lower end displays offering a "full HD" display, we would expect the base resolution of games to rise to match them, and we wouldn't be surprised to see some level of hardware assistance for stereoscopic 3D. Improved resolution by default will produce higher quality in texture filtering ensuring a far cleaner presentation all-round. In terms of textures themselves, we would hope to see an end to low-res artwork - assuming the new hardware offers up the levels of RAM that developers are hoping for.

Typically from generation to generation we have seen an 8x increase in RAM, suggesting a 4GB standard on the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation. However, memory is by far the most coveted system resource and a recent GameFest presentation from Crytek reveals that the developer is hoping for RAM in excess of 8GB for the next wave of consoles. Bearing in mind how strongly developers fought for the 512MB of RAM in the Xbox 360 over the initial 256MB spec, we would expect the platform holders to be considering requests like this very seriously, especially as the level of RAM has clear implications on the longevity of the platform.