Lots of contributing factors, but most of them would have to be in place for a hypothetical crash to occur.

Fragmented market: too many gaming platforms although as long as each maintains its own established niche through consistent and quality releases, this is less of a factor. I don't see this as being a real potential factor unless several publishers decide to jump into the hardware business and bring nothing new to the business.

A consumer wide shift away from gaming as a significant form of entertainment. Gaming is now unquestionably mainstream, in part responsible for maintaining current bloated development budgets.

It won't take too many failed 8 figure projects over a short period of time to result in similar projects in development from being axed along with their development studios.

Excessive focus on the non-traditional gamer in terms of number of projects/games and overall resources.

By itself, this is not a problem, but if the industry becomes too reliant upon this broad niche to fund bigger projects, to produce the highest yield of profits through volume development of quick and easy titles, or simply to stay in business to continue to churn out uninspiring softs, it could lead to a loss of mainstream interest in the gaming media as a form of entertainment (as was the case in '83).

If the industry becomes dependent upon the "casual" (broader market non-traditional/core gamer), then a significant loss of sales from this demographic would in effect remove one of the legs holding up the industry as it currently stands.

When there is a boom, there will be a bust.

Bubble effect, etc.

The most obvious source of a crash now, IMO would be one of the "loss leaders" exiting the industry.

Specifically - Sony or MS. Its unlikely, but can you imagine if either decided to quit. How many projects would be canceled, studios closed, jobs lost...

I think the market is too mainstream now to have the same sort of crash that we did during the Atari days.

If next gen, because of the success of the Wii, the market would be flooded with new consoles, this could happen. Nintendo is destroying the industry.

World War III.

It takes billions to enter the industry and a proven track record to entice 3rd party publishers.

The circumstance of the 1983 crash cannot repeat itself because the barrier for entry is now too high.

Nice try, troll but thanks for playing.

For there to be another crash, all three consoles would have to lose control over publishers completely, the same way Atari did. First, games cannot be made independently, outside of the console makers and be sold anymore. Second, entire games cannot be copied from each other anymore and sold as new releases. Just look at the backlash that PC adventure game got when it was discovered it had used assets from Oblivion.

The likeliest scenario would be development costs getting too high, but even then, the market would just work itself out, not crash. All console manufacturers would cease to create new and expensive hardware if something were to occur that drastically. We already saw the first steps of this with the Wii and I expect Sony and Microsoft to follow suit accordingly.

Raising development cost seems most likely.

if nintendo owns most of the market then fails to maintain it..
or if the oil runs out

What would cause another crash?

No Wii or DS. That wou do it