The question of production value comes into play here; whether the production value that requires a $60 price to recoup development costs is sustainable to the consumer base playing these games.
If general interest ever shifts towards mobile games (majority share of market) then the current business plan of spending two years worth of a full developer studio's resources on a major budget game suddenly becomes questionable.
Would there still be a market for these games? Of course. But the question is whether the market for such games would still be large enough to sell enough units to recoup costs and justify further development of such projects to whoever was financing the studio. If not, budgets shrink, projects become less ambitious and the focus may shift away from production values to profitability. Titles like Heavenly Sword and Enslaved come to mind when it comes to examples of games that clearly had big production value, yet were often measured by consumers on the basic merit of length in regards to whether they merited a $60 purchase and underperformed financially as a result.
The question doesn't come into play as often (paying for production value as opposed to duration of entertainment hours/minutes), but when looking at something like film, a movie that cost less than $1m to produce still has the same ticket price as a film with a $100m budget at the same theater showing both films.
In many cases in the gaming industry, there are titles that try to sneak a $60 full retail price for a game that clearly does not have the same production value/cost/man hours as say a AAA title priced the same.
That's something that definitely won't be sustainable if the trend to mobile games continues.
Worst case scenario, there might not be enough of a sustainable market for even AAA title high budget/production value games if they simply aren't selling enough units to remain profitable.
The way that the gaming industry has grown, it's no longer the core niche that sustains the market. Lose the extended market/general public audience and you simply can't keep producing 8 figure budget titles to sell primarily to a shrinking core audience.
While I don't think the industry is there yet, I agree that there is reason to be concerned for all the above reasons.
