We all know that software companies can be the darlings of the Wall Street one day and then bankrupt within 5 years. Acclaim, Atari have gone down with the ship...Midway, Edios, (new) Atari again have been slowly sinking...Sega had a drastic loss in game quality over the last 5 years and are no longer a AAA company.

My vote goes to Ubisoft.Ubisoft largely depends on Tom Clancy software license and if another company was to outwrestle that license from them, they would lose a big chunk of their business. They could pursue other licenses with that money but who is to say those will be as successful.

Also, Ubisoft seems to be concentrated on hardcore gaming a lot. Sure they have the rabbits game but they don't have a guitar hero...rock band...or many Wii games in development like Sega for example. Their game development costs must be pretty high so they are taking bigger risks. Few big titles become badly reviewed and dont sell...it will be a Disaster:Day of Crisis indeed. :)

Finally, ubisoft montreal seem to have few key people that lead that group and if they were to leave for another company, I am pretty certain games like Assassins Creed 2 and next Prince of Persia would not be as good.So I think Ubisoft is... one big license loss - fall of hardcore gaming - few key people leaving... away from disaster.

What do you think...Which one of the MAJOR players in the industry could possibly lose its success in the next 5 years?

Ubisoft is making a mint from the DS. My Word Training is doing ok but the kiddie and girl games have huge sales and tiny costs.

hmmm...can Square-Enix make a hatrick...

I don't think Ubisoft is so much at risk.

They have diversified rather well this last few years with AC and Prince of Persia and their Montreal studio has been churning best sellers every year...( they lost the head of the Montreal Studio 2 years ago which was supposedly their pillar there and it didn't affect AC at all).

If I had to make a guess it would be Square Enix as it still isn't diversified that much out of Japan and despite the Wii success overthere the Japanese market overall is still in a slump....

Or any other big Japanese developers that make the majority of its revenue in Japan...

Overall development and marketing costs have increased and it's getting harder and harder to gets back on costs with just Japanese sales and quite a few Japanese games still don't export that well..( and the arcade market that a lot of Japanese companies use to supplement their revenue is doing really bad).

Microsoft.

Apple is gaining on their OS market by HUGE numbers. If the trend continues along the path it is, in 5 years there will be more OSX users then Windows users.

I don't know how well MS can support themselves if OS sales decline in those numbers.

Theoretically, anyone could....a lot can happen in 5 years.

Are there really that many business outside of the publishing industry running OSX now ?

I see some buying apple hardware here and there but they run Windows on it..

Like FreeTalkLive said, I think their library a diverse enough to last a while but they are definitely more prominent/in your face than a few years ago. Codemasters were crazy to pay what they did for the F1 license, they could be in trouble if they can't turn it into a very profitable franchise. Someone should do an A1GP game - possibly the next game from SCE Liverpool???

Are you kidding?

Due to the Imagine series and the success of Tom Clancy, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Assassin's Creed, they're making a killing! And they're free to milk these series and more for the rest of the generation.

Microsoft, as a publisher, has been on the down slope for a while now. They weren't in the Top 10 publishers for the American chart this week.

This is simply incorect

Here is a 2006 graph showing mac OS marketshare at 6.38%

And here is one form November 2007...With Mac at 7%. Amazing progress isn't it...

Vista went from 0.9 to 9 % in the same timeframe so Microsoft are growing around 1000% faster with Vista compared to Mac and their 10.4 OSX.

http://bp0.blogger.com/_PbyCg8B9VUI/R1UV7Wz4wkI/AAAAAAAAAKg/8lyuy1n-qI0/s1600/operating-system-market-share.jpg