The current industry has survived tons of buggy and terrible games, but what will be the high profile bomb that does an ET and destroys the reputation of the entire industry?
Starfield is insanely hyped, if that bombs, it could have big repercussions.
Other than that, we could have the industry stagnate down to just first-party publishers, considering how Activision has become yet another part of Microsoft.
Maybe it's not possible to have another video game crash, maybe the industry is too established for that to happen again. It's an interesting discussion.
There won't be a games "crash" like you saw in the 1980s, because the video game market is too big and too stable now. You might see a crash in certain genres or platforms, but not across video games as a whole.
MMOs have been in basically a slow motion crash for a long time now, yet when new games like New World and Los Ark come out, millions of people rush to play them (then drop them within days or weeks).
Video games have definitely stagnated in a lot of ways, yet there are still releases like Elden Ring that everyone goes crazy for.
Yea there is no one "video game market".
Certain segments like say Playstation, Xbox, Steam, mobile games, indie games, etc might crash but the market as a whole is too big. At least if we're talking internal reasons.
What could crash all those segments if is the economy world wide crashes. Games are a luxury and those are the first to be cut from people's budgets. That looks like a real possibility thanks to Western governments and their green hysteria coupled with sanctions against their own energy supplies.