How Will the Gaming Industry Crash?

[Mythmaker1]

DanneSandin said:

Mythmaker1 said:

DanneSandin said:
I don't think we'll ever see a Gaming Crash; there's way too many people playing games and enjoying them for the whole industry to fail. We might see stagnation and decline, but never a gaming crash, like the one in the 80's. That's like asking if the movie industry will crash, or music, or literature. These are hobbies enjoyed by millions of people, and so is gaming.

If the AAA games drops in creativity, the indie devs will pick that part up, earning more money, and thus being able to create bigger and bigger games, until we (yet again) have the so called "mid tier" games back. I cannot phantom a scenario where the whole industry comes crashing down - unless every developer everywhere suddenly starts making ONLY mediocre/boring games, and that's not gonna happen.

There are a lot of ways an industry can crash.  I'm not saying it will, but it's certainly possible.

And it's not unprecedented. There have been similar-ish situations in other industries in the past.

I actually wouldn't mind examples of both instances =)

But like mummelman put it just a few post ago; (digital) gaming has spread out too far and wide for it all to simply nearly disappearing. 500m downloads of Angry Birds should tell you something about how popular gaming is now.

I'm not saying it will disappear. An industry can crash without being completely destroyed.

For an example, comic books in the 90's. Arguably, the collapse of the Hollywood studio system. For that matter, historians might call what's happening in books and movies right now a crash.