I don't think this is a threat to "Core Games" as much as it is a demonstration on how flawed the business model of HD games has been ...
In most industries you would probably determine the budget of a game based on the realistic worst case scenerios for how the game would sell in order to limit your risks and maximize the return you would receive off of a product. In the videogame industry a business model formed where products are given whatever resources are needed to maximize the visual quality of the game, and then the marketing budget is set based on how many sales are needed to make the game profitable; this business model probably worked really well in the mid 1990s where bumping the budget of a Playstation/N64 game from $1 Million to $2 Million easily ensured the 50,000 to 100,000 unit sales increase necessary to recover the costs, but it doesn't seem to be working that well when you're (in many cases) increasing the development cost from $10/$20 Million to $40 Million and need to gain 1 Million sales to recover the costs.
