FatCat said:
It's quite obvious that consoles ware reason for real decline.
Not just consoles but a specific one: the fucking XBOX. Before that consoles tended to have for the most past mutually exclusive titles compared to what the PC offered. The XBOX gave developers the ease of making one game to serve several platforms at once, and since consoles were always going to be more accessible to the average pleb than a PC, it was mathematically predictable as to what platform would become the focus of developers.
As for Jaesun and others who believe in the great Bioware conspiracy to destroy RPG's; consider a past where Baldur's Gate did not exist:
* Bioware would certainly not have existed and neither would have their subsequent games or Obsidian's improvement to the original IP's.
* Interplay would have gone bankrupt sooner, maybe wouldn't even have made it to release PS:T (certainly it wouldn't have published IWD 1 and 2, never mind ever getting as far with Van Buren as they did).
* 3DO/NWC would still have folded after making MM9. It wouldn't have been any better a game and wouldn't have sold any better.
* Sirtech would still have folded after making Wiz8. Game also wouldn't have sold any better.
* Troika if it still formed, would still have made barely playable buggy games and would have folded. This is assuming they could even find funding for their projects.
* Deus Ex, SS2, Arx Fatalis, Gothic, Morrowind may still have been made. Would have sold more or less what they would have were BG to have existed.
* Oblivion and Fallout 3 would still have been made. Bethesda didn't rely on anything from the Bioware model, and if anything, without the competition they may have dominated the market even more.
* The few mainstream publishers who still funded RPG's might not have even done so were they not encouraged by the success of BG. So many of the last great experiments by devs like Troika might not have even been possible were Sierra and Activision not at least somewhat encouraged by the possibility that RPG's could still make money.
All these things would still play out more or less the same. In fact BG actually allowed Interplay to survive a bit longer and release some more stuff so if anything the existence of BG actually had some benefit. All this is because of two things:
Diablo 2 would still have been made.
The XBOX would still have been released.
It's actually very canny of the Codex to have Diablo as one of the top RPG's of the decade. Diablo more than BG, more than anything else, created not only a slew of H&S style copycats after it, but it forever ingrained certain ideas in the general public about what an RPG is supposed to be. We don't have to agree but that's not important. It's what the masses believe and that makes all the difference. Most subsequent RPG's has been consciously or subconsciously created to follow the ideal of ease of access, pick up and play, looting etc. Eventually WoW would take all these things and become the 'ultimate RPG'.
As for the influence of the XBOX, well it's already been said what it's effect was.
All BG led to was the Bioware model, which only Bioware adopted(until CDPR came along and took the basic cinematic storytelling aspect and did it's take on it). Other RPG's came and went, died or survived regardless. It was the consoles, the mid-late 90's rise of the 3D accelerated graphics revolution, the domination of the FPS and RTS, Diablo 2, which led to the entry into the gaming realm of vast numbers of new interested people seduced by all this that killed the traditional RPG.
Not BG2 a iso 2D game based on P&P (D&D is shit system but still above modern whackamole). 
It's just like that Butterfly Effect movie...but with less child porn.
