For whatever it's worth, I was once employed by one of the big four game companies. I did media and public relations for them. I'm not saying this makes me a magic seer of all things to come in the industry, but it does give me some perspective since I worked with marketing, advertising and human behavior in this specific field. I could still be wrong, but this is my take on it:
I agree with much of what's been posted here.
I'd add that with the proliferation of browser games, apps for smartphones, and so on, that it's becoming easier and easier for people to create their own games and market them on the cheap. In other words, anyone with a decent idea and some basic tools can now produce their game.
That means the world isn't forced to play a bunch of broke-dick games any more, and pay out the ass for them. I can get just as many broke-dick games for free from my smart phone as I can from the major game companies.
Madden comes to mind (yes, let's pick on EA some more). That game has been broken pretty much since the day it was created, and despite knowing full well what the flaws in that game were, EA intentionally - let me emphasize this, intentionally - left bugs in the game knowing that people would buy the game next year hoping the bug was fixed. There's a bug with some punts in the game that has been present since it was a Super Nintendo game where if the punting team gets down field fast enough and catches the punt, it's considered a turnover and the punting team gets the ball. This bug was present in the first Madden for Super Nintendo. It was in the XBox version. It was in the Playstation version. It was in the PS2. It was in the PS3 and the XBox 360. It's present now in the PS4. All of these consoles had different programming requirements, so clearly the game has been reprogrammed for each of them - yet that bug, mysteriously, remains present and consistent in every version of the game ever made, and EA has known about it since day one.
That's probably not a bug at this point. The only way that happens is if the bug and code that created it are found, clearly identified, and then reprogrammed with the bug still present on purpose. That's the only way you get the same bug to appear in so many different iterations of a game - especially since the source code had to change over the years as well.
EA and Madden did that.
But they survived, because to make a game cost a lot of money and they could simply outspend the competition (Front Page sports had a football sim that was at least twice as good, but EA managed to crowd them out of the market by throwing giant money at the NFL).
That's how that industry operated for the last 20 years.
But now...
I can find broken games for free pretty much anywhere, and they're just as entertaining as the big dollar games, but without the sense of feeling fucked over for paying for stupid shit once I get bored and decide that it is in fact, utter shit.
I have a game on my smart phone called Pocket Frogs. This game is stupid. You get a baby frog and you raise it, take it to the pond to catch flies, mate it with other frogs at the pond, race it, and sell any offspring you want. Along the way you collect certain sets of frogs.
It's pretty retarded.
But I've had it on my phone for 2+ years now, and I play it as much or more as I ever played Madden, and it's always current, and sometimes they add new features - and they do it for free.
There are several other stupid games out there I can think of that match the feelings I get from Pocket Frogs as well. I have a trading card game, an arcade Coin Dozer game, a Prize Claw, let's not even mention Candy Crush. I also have a settlers game where you try to settle the old west - sort of a Sim City, but more fun - yes, I said more fun. And free. We could probably all go on and on with decent games that are at least of comparable quality to what the console games are.
So since the world can now get other games without paying for them, and since these other games are just as good, the gaming industry has only one resource left to work with: Quality. Game design, customer interaction, depth of story, quality of game.
But companies like EA have been ignoring (or moving contrary to) that part of the gaming industry for so long, they not only don't know how to do it but they've gotten it burnt into their psyches that it's actually counter-productive.
As long as that remains the case, expect for worse and worse console games to be produced. They cost a lot to make and they're not getting as strong of a return on investment as they used to. That should tell the industry to improve their product, but that's not what the industry will do. Instead of improving their product they'll keep churning out cookie cutter games hoping to get those people that still want that particular game and want to continue the series, and they'll churn these suckers out with less and less funding put into their development. Less trouble-shooting, less money spent on writers, less money spent on game testing, and so on.
In other words, what the industry ought to do (and could do easily if it wanted) is focus on quality.
What they will do instead is continue to try to get the most out of their customers while spending less and less on game development. And in the end, the consoles will go away.
Games themselves won't die. I'm not saying that. But the end of the current console structure of gaming is coming to an end. One way or another.