It's too diverse to crash.

I do think another "big publisher" will go under however, like Atari and THQ and others before. And I do think buying $60 discs to play on a $400 console is a paradigm with limited life expectancy.

Hate to say it but I think I agree.
Well I guess it boils down to what you think a crash is. If such a thing were to happen I think I would take that as another crash. I don't expect games to disappear. But I do expect a lot of jobs in the industry to disappear.

I feel your guesses are right. I think this console generation is going to be a sizeable shrink over the previous one, even without counting the Wii phenomena.

I love my Wii, so I don't like admitting this, but quite a few Wii owners just assume play on their phone, it seems. Or, if they are a serious gamer, first off they should move up to a Wii U, secondly, most their friends probably only seriously play on another platform, which may lead to neglect. Unfortunately, Wii's are not fashionable, and for gamers other consoles are and phones are fashionable for the casual market.
Anybody else not like the word "gamer?" I just hate saying it, don't know why.

About 5 years ago, I would say yes we were going to have a crash soon and it would cripple the industry. But after seeing the indie game and classic game renaissance thanks to social media and the web, I don't think so anymore. Great games are being made all the time and many of them the consumer is directly funding, its a great time to be a gamer.

It will, and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been watching the stock market, gauging public opinion or watching the declining sales numbers of the AAA games company of rising sales of the indie game companies.
It's going to happen, eventually. Slowly, or quickly, it will still happen. And I can't wait :)

I don't see that as a crash, but the AAA companies toppling over and letting the indie type of games win out. I think there will be a day where AAA publishers will stop throwing tons of money on a game and just try to make something fun to play

But then, Ice Cube and other celebrities turned not very good voice actors will have almost nothing but royalties to live on.

I think it's an insanely pointless term. What is a "gamer" at this point? Anyone who ever plays video games? That's a human at this point (well, in the West anyway). My wife plays phone games daily when waiting for the bus or whatever, that doesn't put her in the same group as myself, playing classic and modern PC RPG, stealth and shooter games. And I'm not the same as a college dude playing CoD on weekends or a JRPG nut or on and on and on and on.

It's too eclectic now to simply say "gamer" and have it mean a damn thing.

I agree entirely, I was going to take conflict with the JRPG nut thing, but I can't deny it really (some of these you really have to like this kind of thing to like, so the term nut is applicable to me I suppose).

I don't like saying "apples and oranges", but I think I need to reiterate and stress that the 1980's US video game market was VASTLY different from todays market. It was much smaller, much more centralised and still in it's uncertain infancy. If a single company happened upon hard times they constituted a large percentage of the market. Today the US market is not made up entirely of American companies and there are simply many more American companies making up the total games industry. Hardware and software are almost completely separate, a single company does not need to master both so the stakes are lower than in the 80's. The game development industry is probably one of the most diverse entertainment industries in the world today, more so than music and cinema. Because of it's strong technological nature it is also one of the most adaptable industries, seemlessly transitioning into whatever is most attractive to it's customers (unlike the music and cinema industries that are very slow and even fighting it's customers to keep a business model that has worked since the ~1950's). The conditions that toppled the static big names in the 80's are not enough to topple the meshed web of big and small names that exist today.

As for us consumers, it's not about being vigilant or informed, it's about voting with our wallets. Exceptionally expensive releases and chopping up game content into DLC should not be encouraged and the only way you can do this is by not paying what they ask for. They don't care about forum rants on these subjects. Because people keep pre-ordering at ridiculous prices, the publishers feel confident and enjoy swimming in money. I don't see how this is a sign of a coming crash. Quite the opposite actually.

I would have to agree with this. It's not going to be a crash but a popped bubble where the good will rise to the top, while others will disappear into the ether.

Eventually, economic theory says as prices rise, and people see less and less value, those people will stop buying, period. It's slowly coming to the point where people are realizing how crappy AAA games are, and are starting to vote with their wallets. Things like steam sales are helping that. People aren't buying games at top prices. Not according to the stock markets and the fact that AAA games companies keep offloading their development teams. All signs point to some sort of crash in the AAA game companies. Indie games may take up the slack. We'll see.

It kills me to say that this is a pretty likely scenario, considering I love Japanese games and things in general. Console space is getting smaller (I read that PS4 needs to hold up this momentum for a long while or else it risks being sold off), possible over saturation of Japanese games to console/ serious audiences (How many RPGs alone came out on PS3 when development costs leveled out?), some business practices probably do need to change, but which ones and how many varies between the different companies. For what it's worth, I heard Square was going to change parts of their business model. That could be good, if they make good games still (or start to again). Don't be too sure that American firms and European ones won't see problems, it seems even when Activision is doing well they still need to downsize, they and EA it seems (as always, correct me if I'm wrong). Expect sooner or later the yearly release model will lead to at least a couple miserable failures (like, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, or Battlefield, any other yearly's?)