Well, at the same time, there only oh so many casual titles that'll keep selling. It'll reach the point f the hardcore soon enough. You have to understand that 1 major reason "hardcore" titles don't sell is competition and repetition.

When you look at a game like assassins creed, it sold 6 mil despite being chock full of bugs. This is because it was basically a new idea that people found interesting and the experience it provided wasn't provided by any other game around at least when it released.

Stranglehold on the other hand is just Max Payne with better graphics. Also, shooters like Battlefield: Bad Company probably didn't sell as much as EA would like which was probably just because many still loved COD4 and just won't switch to a new shooter just yet( me included).

Lastly, you have scenarios like this fall where everyone chugs out their games at the same time. What happens then is that many people just don't have enough money to buy so many games at once and even if they did, most don't have the time to play them anyway.

So if you ask me, competition is competition. Halo would always be first choice over many other IPs for those into sci-fi FPS games. Also, online gaming tends to make people stick to playing a single game longer. When the casual market gets more informed, they'll have this problem as well. It would also become a matter of choosing Take-two's game party over EA's mini-game collection.

Also, technology costs as we all know only ever move in 1 direction and that's south. They'll eventually go down no matter what. This would come in a few years time as HD adoption slowly increases because we'll get to the point where HDtvs are the only option in the store. I bought a 27in 720p/1080i HDTV for $350 july last year. It wasn't expensive by any means. So basically just like we don't have black and white TVs for sale anymore, there'll only be HDTVs in stores. That'll also help bring costs down.

When it all boils down to it, the real killer of HD gaming is repetition. Devs replicate the top IPs to make money but most gamers just buy only the top names they know and trust. Also rushing titles when popular IPs are releasing is asking for bad sales as well.

Another huge killer is the rental and used game market. Its bad enough that I know more people who rented mgs4 than bought it. I couldn't start to imagine the sales if the only option was to buy it new.

The simple fact of the matter is that it is getting easier to rent games than ever before thanks to gamefly and even your local blockbuster but luckily for casual titles, those tend to be the type who go to blockbuster to rent movies not games and don't even get me started with gamestop's used game policy. Tech costs ultimately go down and so are just a temporary annoyance. It's these other factors that are strangling hardcore games

Posting so I can find this easily. I don't have the time to read it right now.

Edit: Good read. I agree that this high risk, high reward strategy that has been going on is going to nip some developers in the ass. If you look at Sony and the financial situation they are in now it is the same thing. They broke the bank and thought they would get it back with high sales and high software sales wich obvioulsy is not happening.

And I can agree with that because it goes hand in hand to what I'm saying.  The high development costs and long development times leaves developers to take less risks.  In taking less risks we see more games that are going to "replicate" other franchises such as the Halo ripoffs or Call of Duty ripoffs.  Like I said this is bad for an industry because an industry that doesn't move forward, dies.

So what happens when casual gaming takes over, the market saturates in ten or so years. Do we have a hardcore gaming revival?

Probably quicker.  And then it goes through something like in 1983 and we'll probably see something similar to the revival.  Probably fronted by Nintendo again considering its doubtful they would have completely shifted.