What's the worst case that can happen to game industry?

[dschumm]

The worst possibility is when companies do not respond to market desires and try to tell the market what it wants, or to rest on the laurels of previous accomplishment.

We have seen this in great video game crash before. Also just look to the auto industry where the big 3 crammed crappy cars down the throats of consumers in the 80s forcing them to the Japanese brands.

We have seen arrogance hamstring Nintendo in the N64 Gamecube era, but they have luckily innovated out of it.

Sony is now facing billions in losses because they assumed they would be king and everyone would eat up Blu-Ray PS3 for ten years because they said so.

The 360 is not currently suffering from this but they need to be careful, Microsoft is certainly guilty of that in other areas. They are surviving on a stable of sequels with very limited success with new franchises and outside their core demographic. $7 Billion in losses means they are spending a ton of money not giving the market what it wants. (this is bad for all of us no matter what anyone thinks)

So I say the worst thing for the market is for Nintendo to get arrogant from the Wii. Imagine a Wii2 with 2GB internal storage, barely 720P, crappy online support, with dolby surround sound. Those weaknesses in the Wii everyone overlooked can't be weak again. And imagine they piss on the 3rd parties again for the Wii2 and assume that the Nintendo standards they everyone has on their shelf again will somehow carry them.

Also Sony could try and push a system based on hardware alone, instead of the games and charge $600. Oh wait they did that.

Then if MS dropped a couple billion on next XBox featuring Madden, Halo, Gears, and Call of Duty. Or if they left out the disc drive and made games download only to piss on all the retailers who are supposed to push the system.