The truth is, I don't know, nobody knows, but I fear that the current game industry heading towards a very large bubble, which might eventuelly burst.
There are many reasons, one is for sure, that the industry invest incredible amounts of money in top AAA games, but on the other hand it is often heard of, that many games don't break the even. We talk about normal games which are so expensive, that they need atleast 1-2 mio. sold copies to break even.
The result is logical: don't change a running system (aka cash cow), so make sequel XXIII instead and polish it like hell.
All who now think , that this is the day of indie need to consider, that we are talking about a spoiled generation of gamers. They expect to get AAA visuals,story and gameplay for free, so I fear that indies will have a very hard time too.
What about MMORPGs, the virtual grail of making endless money ? Well, how many MMORPG developers trying to archieve the sucess of WoW, but eventually herding into F2P seeing no other option to survive. The only really working concept seems to be Guild Wars, instead of counting on a subscription system, they counted on only selling the game once (+ add ons) and take the money to keep up a persistence world for some time.This resulted in a quite clever client-server architecture and a clever business model.
The game industry is still young, yet it already had a crash, maybe the bubble is ready to burst again, maybe it is even necessary, who knows.
I'm curious if the next generation of consoles will take off. Current gen games are already looking amazing, to top this you need really big budgets and the major titles will for sure be amazing, but what about the rest. If a studio can't compete with this budgets, it will need to tone down the game it develops, but toning down means that it could look although good on older hardware, or even tablets ?
Both, blizzard and valve, two really great video game studios, heading away from hi-demand hardware, smaller studios follow (e.g. torchlight) with success. There will be not many studios left over which are able to create games, which are really not feasible on the current gen consoles.
The trouble of the last console generation (to go DVD or not to go, harddisk) were tiny compared to the really complex situation now (consoles vs tablets, casual vs core, publisher vs kickstarter, F2P vs subscription, DRM vs free, retail vs digital distribution, PC vs cloud gaming).
The budget of gamers is limited, especially in time of a financal crisis, but there are just too many parties which need a lot of money to survive, therefore someone needs to fall by the wayside, hopefully not the whole game industry.
This is a very interesting subject. Everytime I think about how big the insdustry has gotten, I feel like its gonna burst soon. Specially because of everything you stated. Also, the amount of good studios that close because they need millions to survive...