THIS isn't impossible! I can see one of the major 3rd parties going down (namely Capcom at the moment, since they had very little money in the bank quite recently), but the whole industry? uh-huh

Indie gaming will flourish though.

Sometime in the next year or two, consumer interest in 7th generation games will collapse. Even with PS4 adoption clipping along as well as it is -- next gen is not providing a big enough userbase to really support AAA gaming.

The industry will crash harder than..............Crash Bandicoot..

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.

By "crash," I'm referring to a general economic collapse.

I'm no expert either, but I understand the music industry is going through a tough time right now. I don't think you can call it a collapse, but it seems to be pretty unstable. As far as books, I guess that was hyperbolic. The brick-and-mortar side seems might have crashed, but the industry as a whole is still kicking.

Everything I know about comic books is second-hand, but from what I've read the crash came about because the big publishers misread the market. The speculators created perceived demand, which led to more comic shops opening, which led to more comics being bought to fill them, which led to more comics being produced. Basically, everyone jumped on the bandwagon of a market they were sure existed, but didn't actually have any staying power.

The reason I think it's sort of an apt comparison (superficially, at least) was the "casual" boom of last generation. A lot of people without much background entered the market, stirred up demand, and then kind of drifted away. The result? THQ doubles down on the U-play, Microsoft bundles a Kinect with every console, and Nintendo develops the Wii U.

With that said, I doubt we'll see an actual crash. Part of the issue with comic books was the method of distribution, and there's too many ways for people to buy games these days.

In the future I could see a potential crash in the dedicated game console section of the gaming market. I am not confident in the fact that enough people will be willing to pay £200-300 for a console, £40 for each game and online fees to sustain that market long term.

Its already crashing.. with the yearly CoD, Fifa/Madden and Assassins Creed there isn't that much room left for other AAA titles in a year.. every year more games will fail and even fewer get the sales they need to survive slowly eating away the companies who make them.. they are scrapping for sales and are glad that GTA isn't also yearly

I think people mention a lot that the 3DS is selling less because of the competition of cell phones and tablets, and don't realize many people who used to buy consoles also have their videogame needs satisfied by cell phones and tablets.

AAA market is declining?

I think the industry may have already crashed as hard as it's going too. THQ and Irrational Games were big hits, but I don't think a full on crash will happen like in the 80's. Although since we are still making the ridiculous PS4 and XBox One games and obsessing over their graphics, its still in progress. I wonder who'll be next.