These games cost too much because of their insane marketing spending. Publishers should also spend less money devoloping games in the US with too strong currency and outsource it to asia and europe with weaker currencies.

Who cares about consoles.

LoL and Dota2 are making an insane amount of money. Dota 2 has given back around 50 million $ for the workshop for player creations.
CS:GO still the most competitive FPS game bringing in the most viewers by far.

Survival of the fittest. Sega? They mostly released crappy games and even destroyed the Sonic IP. Capcom? They went against their fanbase with DMC and RE and the sales suffered. THQ? They were responsible for all the crappy cheap movies adaptations and just went down when that market vanished.

You know, most of these situations are deserved. 2K grew massively this gen while these ones were failing because they knew what they were doing. Warner Interactive became huge, Bethesda too.

Well, last gen over 269 million people cared about consoles. Some even cared so much they got more than one console...

And what about the initial failures of Crive Club, Halo MCC, Ass Creed Unity, Battleflied 4, SimCity and many more? And to be fair about Capcom and RE, the last two main entries sold quite a lot. I think RE6 sold 6m units? That's pretty damn good, even though they've strayed far from the original concepts of the series. THQ had quite a few good game series going (Darksiders and Saints Row to mention a few).

People don't realize that bad games can sell just as well as good games if marketed well. Sales figures don't lie but for how long?

The console state of business seems to be going fine a bit for Sony and MS, not so much for Nintendo but their 3DS is still doing fine while Sony's Vita is not, Sega has decided to go PC/Mobile route due to their failed attempts at making games for consoles and we're still seeing broken games day 1 full up the wazo of micro trans, locked dlc, pre-order/day dlc and season passes, the more I see all those the more I just wash my hands of it and wait till it's dirst cheap.

PC on the other hand is thriving quite well, they still seem to be the top in revenue thanks to the likes of Dota,LoL and CS with other games being backed by users with the likes of Star Citizen, a game no publisher or big 3 company would ever dream of funding themselves unless they had full control, we're seeing a lot of indie games mostly stemming from PC first with some eventually making their way to other platforms, the main issue going on with PC atm is some early access indie games are still not following through the proper guidlines and flat out not delivering proper content or progress, some but not all of them and Greenlight is still an issue Valve needs to completely do away with and they also need to rewrite the ea guidelines to further stamp down on devs thinking the ea market is a free ride and money.

Though the one thing I hate most of all this gen is the ports, on either side they seem to be bad, on PC just as bad but all the same, more and more pubs/devs not giving it their all or getting lazy with unoptomised ports, I find 2013 to now the worst years for ports, there are some ports that don't even support higher resolutions on PC let alone other options that have always been with PC ported games in the past, heck Witcher 3 is rumoured to being downgraded due to the current gen consoles limitations, that itself shows bad form for a PC exclusive that's decided to finally go multiplatform but become compromised because of it.

In the end though I'd say the current state is ok, it;s not rgeat or amazing, it could be a lot worse, I would expect major improvements within the next 5 years though, if we keep doing what's trending badly for the enxt 5 years I'd hate to see where it leads us.

Interesting post. I think you said it best about consoles: PS4 and XB1 is doing just fine, but "seeing broken games day 1 full up the wazo of micro trans, locked dlc, pre-order/day dlc and season passes" is setting a bad trend. And I'm glad to see PC doing as well as it is! Although, like you said, there's some shady indie stuff going on there too.

The numbers say the industry is booming. It's actually driver by the younger crowds with each generation who are dancing with it's corpse.

The reality is that after the mid 90s console gaming died. Up to 2005 PC was showing signs of promise with games like System Shock 2, Thief, Baldur's Gate, Diablo, Prince of Persia Trilogy, Half-Life 1/2 and DotA but then it just went into making shinier visuals and mediocre titles.

At least Nintendo is trying their best to revive it.

What killed gaming? Mediocre games, the heavy emphasis on visuals and multiplayer at the cost of a well crafted singleplayer experience.

Really what I'd like to set a new trend is for us gamers to have a bit more input into what goes on, I mean after all it is our money that goes towards these games, we are the very people they want to make games for, surely having some sort of representitive parties would be a good deal of being able to do away with these horrid trends, besides most people that feed into these trends don't even realise the damage it does to those of us who see our games suffer for it so they won't really matter as much since they managed to survive before those bad trends existed (assuming they weren't born yesterday).

I'm being a bit of a dreamer though, I can't see those trend going away for at least maybe 10-20 years, they feel like one of those trends that are so bad but addictive to give up, that if given up a big loss of money will come from nowhere and cause a rupture within the industry, really we just need to get rid of it one piece at a time for say a 5 year run, 10 years at best, it's clear the "vote with our wallets" option isn't and hasn't done a major dent to the likes of EA, Ubi and Activision, the big 3 remain unfazed and Sony and MS seem content to allow it to happen, we need a message that's crystal clear without a hint of being vague but at the same time with composure, not anger (though we're mostly pissed at this stuff in the first place).

Then again after some thinking were the PS1-PS2 era days really that rosy and golden?, I still kinda remember the horrid first online attempts with my PS2 and the few bugs I had within both PS1/2 games I had back then, surely not as many as today and not enarly as broken but still.