Propably not the next gen, but the future of gaming has a lot of growth popential with countries like China and India getting into gaming. The western shooter might not be so popular anymore but I'm very curious to see what kind of games come out of those countries, serving 2.5 billion people combined.
Indie games have a bright future too with better and easier to use development tools.
Blockbuster games will continue to struggle along for a bit, but there will always be demand for the latest and greatest. The games industry is still growing, a lot of people that grew up with games still occasionally play them. With more mature games that market segment will grow as well. More mature adventure games like heavy rain should help.
And those 'older' games with jobs and kids are usually fine with a 6 hour game. If I tell my friends that a game lasts 15 hours they'll pass by default, no time. It would be nice if games also have a short/normal/extended mode next to difficulty modes. I'm sure my friends would love Mass Effect if there was an option to condense the game into 6 hours, cut all the fluff, cut the shooter sections in half. They did buy Heavy rain, but never finished it, too long, no time, forgot where I was, etc.
Speech recognition and natural language processing will be the next greatest innovation in gaming. Together with language construction and natural sounding voice engines. No more 10.000 sentences of prerecorded speech but an unlimited range of responses. Next gen is probably still too early for that. However adventure games and rpgs where you can talk to the characters and simply point where they have to go kinect style will get a whole lot of people interested in gaming. I miss the old adventures where you type commands and talk to characters. Most of the magic was lost when that mechanic was replaced with the mouse. That reminds me I should boot up starship titanic again and have another conversation with the elevator about the universe.
