The market is about to split, which is bit of a good and a bad thing at the same time. The big companies clearly want to move to the consoles, and put a chain on the neck of PC users, imposing more and more ridiculous control mechanisms, that have only one aim: in some years you will have to pay for games by the minute.

At the same time I found I can play my games from smaller PC-centric companies, e.g. stardock, ageod, matrix, .., with realism and features I expect from PC games, outdated graphics for sure. But even outdated doesnt mean ugly by todays standards: it's just a question of where you put your focus. Today you can produce nice visuals on top of licensed or opensource engines (Ogre etc), I've had my hand on these and it's possible for a couple of dedicated individuals to make really nice games without a budget of several millions.

I'm not playing Dwarf Fortress, but I already noticed it has a strong following among more discerning communities than this one. It seems to be the kind of game that offers gameplay in spades, not the boring linear formula seen in almost all major console centric releases today.

Anyway, the major step is to realize there are games outside the mainstream. You must look like a pig, but they do exist, and then it doesn't hurt so much to see that an industry that once was innovative and risk-taking is now going the way of Hollywood. There's a small independent market that is developing around the old philosophies, and some things work differently there, but there is hope.