How Will the Gaming Industry Crash?

[HylianSwordsman]

People thought it would never crash before, and then it did. AAA gaming will crash, and indies will rise from the ashes. Microsoft will survive but give up on Xbox, focusing instead on serving indies with PC. Sony I don't really know. I don't want to think they'd go under, but maybe. They're in a lot of debt and Playstation is one of their most important brands right now. I fear they might start moving to mobile, only to have mobile gaming crash too. They might go back afterwards. Yes, mobile gaming will crash. It's too fad based and there's a slew of crap quality games flooding the market. It'll come back too, but on tablets or something similar, not phones. Nintendo will survive by making unique devices. They'll end up so different that it won't even make sense to talk about them getting 3rd party multiplat support. PC games and Nintendo device games will be fundamentally different. It won't be the most successful thing, but they'll survive. I imagine whatever it is will be portable, or have a portable component. Mind you I would imagine all this happening over decades. The crash wouldn't be complete, as it wouldn't affect indie games much. You can be skeptical on the phone thing if you want, but I really don't think phones as we have them now will be around forever. VOIP is just so much better, and will only get better. You won't need a dedicated phone once voice over the internet can be done reliably everywhere. The very term phone will start to lose it's meaning as other devices replace it in functionality. It'll be amidst this transition that the mobile gaming market crashes. Again, not permanently. Here's where Sony might come back, releasing Playstation Now on more devices, and getting new content for it even after they stop making Playstation consoles. And don't get me wrong, consoles aren't going away anytime soon. They won't go away until we don't need them anymore. Just as we didn't really care when arcade games fell out of favor, we won't care when consoles fade. They won't get replaced by PCs, in their place will be things that fulfill the need they did. Nintendo will be good at providing hardware specific gaming, Microsoft will be good at providing traditional gaming through PCs at home, and Sony will thrive with mobile entertainment. Other markets may open up and we may see new types of gaming platforms, with services provided by a new contender like Google, Samsung, Apple, or Amazon.

Or maybe I'm just crazy and my imagination is going wild. It definitely won't go exactly like that.