I´m sure most of you have heard about the famous videogame crash in 1983 (I think that was the year, not sure), and since Nintendo made it relevant again with the NES, the industry has goten so big and profitable, it doesn´t go down even in times of recession....it´d seem this industry wears an undestructible armor, but despite that, what do you think could potentially cause another 'crash'?....One could say "bah, it´s not gonna happen, this industry is getting bigger than all other types of media entertainment"...ok, but there´s always the potential for some kind of threat no one sees coming, and then all of a sudden, it *** up everything.

Standing still. If you aren't pushing innovation you are just going to be watching your marketshare shrink after a while.

Nintendo's headquarters being hit by a meteor, killing the Wii and DS, thereby forcing developers to finance their business with expensive PS3/360 productions only.

That wouldn't kill all the developers, but it would kill enough for us to witness a crash.

I agree. The only other thing would be a virus outbreak/epidemic that attacks the firmware of a console.... then fanboys would make a virus to attack the opposing consoles' firmware... that would cause some major crashing... :P

Well a major economic depression could slow things down...

The video games industry would be one of the last ones to crash (excluding food and other essential stuff like toilet paper).

Not innovating will cause a grasual crash, not one as severe as the one in 83' though. VG companies have taken precautions and steps so that a crash never happens again.

Shovelware becoming the vast majority of offered games.

@NJ5

So, one of the keys would be not to let development keep getting more and more expensive and instead trying to find alternative sources to get people interested?

Yep. There was a pretty eye-opening graph (from Factor 5 I think), showing exponential increases in development cost from generation to generation. Revenue isn't increasing exponentially, so something would have to give.