Mudokon said:
I think that the cause of crash in 1983 was the massive amount of games that most of them was crap with incredibly many clones and it was nearly impossible to tell which game was good and which bad.
Ok the fact is many things changed since 1983 so the reasons for a game crash may vary greatly but even then what do you think would be possible to cause a game crash and what would be the consequences to the gaming community ?
Well, I don't see the same kind of "crash" happening. What I suspect will happen if something like this occurs is that publishers will simply decide the profit margin isn't substantial enough for them given the needed investment of cash. You'll see things dry up rather than crash, with various companies simply stopping to make games, and closing divisions, rather than a bunch of companies just one day having to declare bankruptcy.
As I see things one of the big problems with game development is not just publishers being greedy, but developers being the same way, expecting to be very well compensated for their work. Indeed most of the cost of a game goes towards human resources, since with these budgets the cost of materials (office space and computers) is minimal. It's all about coders and artists, who all insist on being paid top dollar. Of course this is something that leads to a lot of arguments, since really nobody wants to take credit for why gaming is becoming more expensive, and of course nobody considers their own job or pay scale unreasonable for what they do. That's of course why the trend might continue to the point where eventually the money leaves, and without anyone to pay the developers, they wind up having to find other work.
That said a "Crash" in the modern sense would probably mean a lack of consoles when the big companies stop making them, and big development studios. PCs, tablets, etc... will still be around, and as long as they are some people will continue to try and make games for them. Barring something that say knocks out all technology on the planet, this
isn't likely to change.
It's important to note also that at this point enough games and hardware have been created where old games and material would continue to have a following for generations. It's not a situation where there were like five good games and the rest were crap. Things like the PS-2 which don't require an online collection have massive libraries. Even if a gaming crash lasted long enough for all that hardware to fail beyond the point of repair people to keep bringing it back and cannibalizing parts (or specialty businesses to make knockoffs) we've gotten to the point where the games themselves will continue through emulation.... and even the online stuff, especially when it becomes abandoned, will have hackers remove every piece of DRM from it and it will be all over the place.
As things stand now we'll likely never see a future without games of any kind, and at the most a period where nobody is making new ones on anything like a professional scale.
Inevitably if big business gets disgusted and pulls out, eventually, even if it takes a while, someone will realize there is a market there, and will get involved in exploiting it, setting it's ambitions lower than current big business. Basically the whole "decent profit" mentality will return, as opposed to the current "it's not about making money, but how huge a pile of money we can make". The thing that is likely to get the publishers and manufacturers to storm off is leadership that say doesn't consider a paltry few million dollars profit after expenses worth blowing their nose with. Right now unless they can gamble hundreds of millions to make hundreds of millions more in profit they aren't interested, which is why it's all "sure thing" AAA games, and relatively humble indie titles done on a relative shoestring. Games like say "Dark Souls" that fall between the two extremes should be the healthy average for the industry, but few businesses want to play there.... and that's kind of the problem.
