Dipper said I tell you this day, that the Gaming industry is going to crash again - We may be witnessing the first smouldering flames. It will be glorious.
#1: Definitely not glorious. Thousands of people losing their jobs is not glorious. Crashing industries is the complete opposite of glorious: It's horrifying. A company collapsing is one thing, this is a natural part of Capitalism. For instance, if EA gets usurped by a couple newcomers who simply do a better job than EA does, then the jobs lost at EA will be regained by the competitors that take bites and pieces out of it as it falls apart. The entire industry crashing means nobody is biting at those jobs--they're just straight up going away. This not only gives us far fewer choices as gamers in terms of entertainment, but results in thousands of people losing jobs in what is already a shitty economy.
#2: What causes a market crash is purely financial, not emotional. So how are the big dogs doing?
Electronic Arts:
Net Income: US$98.00 million <- Nearly 100 million dollars of pure income after all expenditures. All of them. That's enough money to buy a dozen indie studies if they wanted and not give a rat's ass.
Activision-Blizzard:
"While the company's revenues were down less than 1 percent to $1.05 billion, net profits were up more than 75 percent to $324 million."
Activision doesn't care. Activision is doing well right now. So long as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty keep selling they'll keep doing well.
If anything the triple AAA publishers are very stable at the moment. As well, the first thing they do if they start to suffer is cut out studios that aren't performing to their expectations (such as Pandemic Studios, who made Star Wars Battlefront) which immediately saves them millions in expenditures.
Generally speaking, if you're thinking of a crash like in the 1980's, it's not going to happen. What happened in the 1980's was too many competitors selling too many diluted products over too many consoles, with an arcade market that was still able to kick the shit out of them from time to time. Also of note, the 80's crash was only in North America: Japan and Europe kept going without a care in the world. There were no EA's or Activision's back then, the closest you could really get to that was Atari and they were usually only one blunder away from causing their investors to panic. EA and Activision make constant blunders, but they're so humongous that the investors don't care so long as at least one of the big hitters succeeds, and each of them have at least one baby that will sell consistently for the foreseeable future. (Activision has World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, EA has the Madden series and the Sims.)
If you want to see change in the industry, it's not gonna come from a crash (at least I really hope not), it's going to come from the indie studios quickly flowering out into several mid-tier studios. Ones with a large enough budget to produce high quality, good looking content that could legitimately compete with Call of Duty or others of a similar vein, but retain the ability to reflexively produce inventive and memorable content that the lumbering giants simply can't. Sure, EA and Activision can buy some of them, but not all of them if the indie scene keeps blowing up the way it is.
tl;dr: A crash isn't going to happen and if it does, everyone will suffer. Including you and me.
