GameSpy.com's The Future of Action Gaming offers opinions from both Valve's Gabe Newell and Epic's Tim Sweeney on the subject of where the genre is heading, along with one of the most horrifying accompanying graphics since the animated John Carmack moving mouth image some time back. The article is the second in a three part series, the first focused on The Future of Strategy with a planned third installment to look at RPGs. Here's a bit that quotes both Gabe and Tim on the impact of technology:

Finally, Sweeney feels that "Networking, RPC, security, and synchronization tech will improve and make huge distributed games more possible" and that "Eventually things will go to multi-server, seamless huge environments (at least in games where that is desirable.)"

Gabe Newell felt that the single most important issue facing game companies today, and the one that developers will have to solve before pushing the technology much farther, is the issue of scalability: making games that will work across multiple platforms from the past to the future.