theyarecomingforyou wrote on Jul 7, 2012, 23:39:
The games industry isn't in any danger of collapsing. Just look at Blizzard Activision - they have WoW, Diablo III, Starcraft II and the CoD series. All premium products that have seen little in the way of price drops. The rest of their studios may get heavily affected but there's plenty of money making games to keep them going. Valve will keep going because of Steam and if any major publishers or developers start to struggle they'll be there to snap them up. EA - despite all the shit they pull - still has plenty of money making games, like The Sims, their sports franchise, DICE / BF3, Crysis, Dead Space, etc. And with Origin they'll be making a greater profit per sale, which will continue to improve. And they're invested heavily in the mobile sector, helped by their acquisition of PopCap Games. Again, it's entirely possible we'll see dramatic cuts made but they'll survive. Ubisoft posted improved profits and has mega franchises like Assassin's Creed, the Tom Clancy games and Far Cry 3. And Take-Two plods along with money earners like Civilization, GTA, Borderlands, Bioshock, May Payne, etc.

Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible we'll see one of the major players start to struggle but there are enough other publishers to snap up the attractive licences and move on. And there are a huge number of much smaller independent studios - like Codemasters and CD Projekt RED - ready to take advantage. We've already had a major economic collapse and all the major players survived and are still posting decent profits. Even with the double-dip recession coming / present I think predicting a collapse is more wishful thinking than likely.

The games industry was in its infancy in the 80s. It doesn't even compare to today.