But the most recent AC game has been received quite well, hasn't it? I think the franchise is overall pretty good, minus 1-2 titles, but the good ones do seem to skip a generation, it seems.

The shitty casual mobile games will end up killing all the AAA titles (except for codMWBO9 & fifa18), then only GOG classics & few indies will survive :O

The only "crash" I can foresee is people getting tired of all these "indie" and "retro" games. I hope. :-)

Oh that is already happening.. old-style platformers are the first.

the industry will not crash

if you look back at the last 20 - 30 years it has changed quite alot

a crash no....but it will evolve into a different type of industry - digital only sales probably , as all the bricks and motar stores close down

quality of games has always varied and there will always be more shovelware than AAA titles - 90% of new games are in the shovelware section

its those 10% that are the gems that you should buy

Doubt it. too much demand for AAA games out there.If anything the market is flooded with indies. Too much of a good thing....

Actually that's a good point. The mobile market certainly had the potential to be good but in my view it pretty much has already crashed. It's not that bat shit, profit is only half the picture stability is the other half, and the industry while making a lot of money doesn't seem to stable at the moment.

I doubt anything is really in motion for any serious changes. If the average gamer thought about the industry the way I do then it would be in serious trouble, but as near as I can tell the bulk of gamers, where the money is, don't seem to mind being called whales, milked in ridiculous ways, or seem to give a toss about DRM because it's perfectly fine to toss 60+ dollars on a new game so who the crap cares about what happens to a game that is 6 months old. People don't even seem to care all that much about a DRM scheme dying in like 3 months that has some very big name tiles tied to it. Games that are still being sold, and sold without warnings as to how their functionally may be impaired or end very soon.

The industry is an entitled brat, and customers are OK with putting up with her crap for access to the goods. It seems like a fairly balanced relationship. A one sided, dysfunctional one where one side has no respect for the other, and the other side has no respect for themselves, but it's working - unfortunately.

nope, the market are to big. there always something for everyone.

For me the big crash of 1983 was not very big. Mostly it was centered around US companies. For Europe the time of Atari has ended and the mighty C64 was ready.
But what were the reasons behind the crash? Too many consoles and far too many real bad games for them.

Yes, we will see more famous devs/publisher going bankrupt or sold out (my bet for the next would be Square/Enix). The costs for new AAA games are just too high for the publishers to risk anything, so there are more and more games with a digit in the title.

Well i think it has already been happening because what i call a games industry crash, would more specifically be called the continuing retreat into the twilight zone of platform exclusivity and DRM.

I think as long as people have money, they will be spending some of it on entertainment like video games.

The only foreseeable problem I can see is that sooner or later we will probably see over saturation more quickly than we did in previous generations. Indie games, while original generally, will start to feel less so, the power differences between generations, while in a way large, don't feel significant. Modern military shooters are quickly becoming overly common, sooner or later a CoD will flop, badly, BF is already starting to experience that and I'm not about to blame that on generation transition. Driving games are also starting to become common and there is a little bit less a genre can do every new release, and DLC will make releasing new games irrelevant, at least for sports games where they probably will introduce a yearly roster update when they reach graphical "equilibrium," if you will. Rhythm games with plastic instruments are no longer prevalent, you could just update the song DLC and there's no need for a sequel, yet. So a crash is a little far flung, if you ask me, stagnation, likely to happen. How soon, hard to say. Consoles I feel will die out after this gen. Maybe microconsoles will pop up in the future, as they already have, but they probably will replace big box game consoles. Media players (i.e., those little boxes next to the TV that play Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube) will probably start integrating optional download game support as well. It'll be different, at least.

Edit: Although, you can never go broke under estimating the intelligence of the American people (Not to offend anybody, that's just the line. No one has a monopoly on stupidity or ignorance.)
One more edit: Also, expect the big companies in software to significantly alter their business models. (i.e., Square Enix, Namco Bandai, Konami, Capcom) Actually, those guys are kind of on the chopping block, huh?

Indiegames lately looks like big buble to me. A lot (actually, freaking lot of games) with quality gradually decreasing. Mobile games gone totally casual. Bleh.