I know doomed threads are as much as imagining a zombie apocalypse for some people but that needs to stop, it's tiring. No the industry is not dead. ( i remember when the Wii U failed, everyone was saying " omg the industry is doomed, Durango and Orbis cant do better than the Wii successor, gaming is dead !!! Lol)

Nothing will change, some indie will shine, most will stay in the shadow, those who want best chances to shine have to make something more ambitious than the mass or/and ask help from a publisher. ( so not being an indie anymore) Those who want to stay indie will have to release really innovative/ excellent games like Shadow Complex, Mark of the Ninja, Dust an elysian tail, Guacamelee, Hotline Miami,... That seems unfair that only the excellent/innovative indie games shine ? Dont think so.

I think Tequila Works will be a good example of that, they had the publisher with Microsoft but not the ambition, now they have publisher, ambition and money to satisfy this ambition with Rime.

Whenever there is easy access to technology AND easy access to distribution I start getting worried - without proper curation and discovery tools, the over-saturation of the market simply drowns the good titles and everything becomes the grey goo.

That said, some of today's "indies" will grow (or already have) to become AA devs, and if successful they will survive. IMO, the rest (except for occasional case or two) will eventually die out.

Breaking News! Indie developers discovering how nice a villa at the beach is.

Let Natural Selection runs its course,

and if that doesn't work the Industry could easily use another crash.

I really can't wait to see how they will manage the marketplace on the consoles when we will get some new games every freaking day.

Games released a week ago will be already behind a lot of other games in a “recently released“ list so that new games from unproven developers don't even have a chance to get tried out from enough people to get popular through word of mouth.

We will probably get a situation like on the phones where some will cheat to go up in the “most popular“ list and many others will simply go under as long as they won't find a publisher or will be lucky to get special threatment from Sony or Microsoft (not 100% sure how it works on Wii U).

Xbox 360 got around 4000 of these indie and arcade games and the indie section was already fucked up because of the amount of games. No clue how it shall be this gen when they throw all games in the same market and when we will maybe get much more as a few thousand of indie games.

That's why I fear when Microsoft will make
“every console a dev kit“ a reality. Right now Sony and Microsoft can at least control it a little bit with which developer they give a dev kit so that they won't get any possible trash like “in this game you can control a white dot on a black background“.

What do you consider a B tier games? There are still a lot of games being released that are high quality but aren't AAA. I can name a dozen off the top of my head that are less than a year old.

No, I disagree with both of you. B-tier games aren'r gone, they are being replaced by indoe games. And AAAs arent struggling to make money, half way decent games priced at $60 a pop "are" struggling to make money. Just look at sales of TLoU, GTA5, CoD, BF4, NBA2k14, Tomb Raider, Infamous:SS, ACIV, KZ:SF, Ryse, Forza and watch sales of watchdogs..... these are all AAA games and selling over a million is not doing poorly or struggling. And every game I mentioned there will probably go on to sell at least 3ml copies in their lifetime. At least. Some have already exceeded 10ml.

Bad games don't sell, be them AAA or inides, and I think he is right. But not in the sense that a bubble is gonna burst, but that indie devs won't be able to get by by just being "indie" soon and they will have to also make really great compelling content. 

I don't know why this is hard to understand by devs or even by consumers. The gaming industry is about buying and playing games. Games need to be fun and make you want them enough to spend your money on them. There is noting wrong with ppls desire to want to play games. There is a lot wrong with the kind of games that are being made and how much is expected to pay for those games. 

Give me an example of a B-tier game.

'B' tier game: Wonderful 101.

Excellent game, but built on a budget and aimed at a niche audience.

B-tier games are almost gone and have not been replaced by indie games. Wonderful 101 is a B-tier game. There's not one indie game out their with that kind of bugdet and polish. And most AAA games fail to make a profit. We just hear about the successes. There are far more failures.