Is shrinking market size all that bad?

[Landguy]

Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

Last Gen was the biggest in terms of console sales, 260 million from the previous 190 million of the prior generation.

And yet many people claim that their favorite generations were the earlier 3,4, or 5th generations.

Sure, many more people became gamers and gaming as a hobby became a lot more mainstream and acceptable.

Furthermore, Gaming garnered a greater focus and budgets skyrocketed, but is this really such a good thing?

With a growing market and more money being pumped into the industry, we have more risk on developers, and instead of these larger budgets giving us more innovation, diversity is actually decreasing. Games are being designed to appeal to as many people as possible rather than making as good an experience for those who actually like the genre, and gaming is stagnating as a whole.

Perhaps a downsizing and a refocus is actually what we need.

I answered "Yes" to the poll.  More for the reason that I think that the console systems total sales will shrink. 

Last gen we saw a huge amount of people buy a Wii and then make very little investment into the platform.  They didn't purchase that many games.  We also saw those same people either buy a PS3 or a 360(or both).  So, the number of actual users were far fewer than the 260 million would suggest.  The real question is whether the market realyl grew at all.  I think last gen grew only marginally if anything.  Most users who may have bought a Wii or a PS360 and were only casual gamers seemed to replace those systems with tablets or smartphones.  They realized that for what they really need a game system for, they don't really care enough to get a console again.  Because last gen was 8 years long, we shouldn't be seeing the continued slowdown of the sales of the PS4 and XB1 this year. They should have been steadily increasing if the "real" demand was there.

So, I agree that a downsizing is inevitable.  As far as the refocus?  Probably not for a year or two, as development timelines take so long before these companies will buy into the shrinking market.