I'm innocent for this. I haven't bought an EA game for 10 years, and only 2 fps (Killzone 1&2 I didn't even finished) for the same period. The only sport game I bought was the sega's arcade game virtua tennis with my PS3.

I think the only reason why EA and its sport games are selling so much are the licenses that make them rare. You can only have 1 or 2 soccer game because of licenses, so all the sales concentrate on these titles. That's also why they can sale a new one every year.

Casual gamers are, most notably CoD, Madden, and GTA (I'm inclined to putting Halo and Gears of War in there as well) gamers that fall into the shooter or sports craze and buy the shovelcrap EA/Activision/whoever pump out.

No, this 'Blockbuster or Bust" mentality is what is killing the industry. Can you imagine a movie industry where every movie had to be a huge summer blockbuster with all the explosions, stunts, and big actors?! Even script writers would become minor celebs. Anything that brings in less than $200 million will simply not do! It's madness. This addiction to huge risk/huge rewards means all but the biggest publishers will die.

Publishers need to acknowledge small but passionate niche markets, More JRPGs! More RTS! More Point and Click Adventures! More Horror! Those titles will sell, just not blockbuster numbers. If those games are made with a reasonable budget they will make a nice stable profit. They will negate some of the risk that bigger titles bring.

Look at Telltale Games. No one scoffs at the graphics in their games, some even call them beautiful. They are able to make games at a reasonable budget and have no trouble selling games. Make lower budget games and sell them for $40. People will buy especially in niche markets. Not much competition there.

TLDR; mid-tier games need to come back.

Angry Birds... 

Woah woah woah. You cannot put the blame on Nintendo fans.

If plan to blame anything nintendo related then blame the studios who put out terrible ports on Nintendo platforms.

Flappy birds....

Its the AAA studios who are driving themselves in to the ground.
Massive budgets for mediocre games which look good just do not sell any more.
Indie devs are prospering and are proving you dont need a huge budget and billions of sales to be successful,
its a change in the gaming ecoshpere, and one that AAA studios will be slow to catch up on.

Well. I thought games were already on a downward spiral since the Playstation 3/Xbox 360 arrived, publishers and developers simply do not take any risks even with relatively smaller budgets.

Long gone are the days where developers would attempt something truly unique and different and attempted to create new genre's.
Games like Sacrifice where it blended 3rd person and real-time strategy, which was an amazing game, it was "original and fresh" upon it's release, the only experience I have had that blew me away in terms of originality like that game was Minecraft and Sanctum, both aren't AAA games or even AA.

Now games are just full of "press A to win", cut-scenes that take away control from the gamer when it could have been far more interactive. (Uncharted, The Last of Us, Halo, Gears etc' being culprits.)

Thankfully, the light at the end of the tunnel arrived for the PC awhile ago as gamers are no longer at the mercy of multi-billion dollar publishers who wish to pad their pockets with $100 bills, PC gamers are funding new games that *they* wish to play like Star Citizen and Planetary Annihilation instead of being force-fed the same yearly rehashes of old franchises with little innovation.

/rant of an angry gamer.

Sadly, gaming is get worse as the years go by.

How is it single handed if it's all of us?