Ok, here's what I predict will happen within the next 10 years:
1) Internet coverage will only increase, and increase dramatically.
2) Internet speeds will increase a lot, both for consumers and for the backbones. New cables will be laid between continents and within the next 10 years, the bandwidth will increase at least a hundredfold. In Japan, apparently, gigabit internet connections have been available for a few years already.
3) All content delivery will shift to digital domain. For games, this means very radical changes in the business as a whole. I've talked about some of this before, but the main points are:
3a) Retail will no longer get as much profits from game sales, so HW and accessories will have to make up for the loss of profits, meaning higher margins and more expensive hardware.
3b) Content delively margin structure changes with the removal of distribution/retail from the delivery chain, so the price of content should come down quite a bit.
3c) Episodic delivery of content will become more and more mainstream, both to manage risk within big projects, and to get to profits quicker. This also means that even if the average size of games continues to increase, the episode sizes will still be easily manageable.
3d) The roles of developers/publishers will change, and more and more devs will bypass publishers as they can access the customers directly via the digital distribution channels.
