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.
One of two possibilities that I see.
Either:
Diversity and HR policies will continue sucking what joy remains from game development, all the competent creative people will flee; and all you'll have left is the drama queens and the people who are just there to collect a paycheck and will do whatever tasks are assigned to them no matter how nonsensical they are.
Or:
Improvements to computer hardware will slow to a point where newer models of computer will no longer be able to make up for inefficient code, and there won't be enough programmers with low-level programming knowledge to be able to optimize the code to improve performance. Possibility #1 may exacerbate this effect, as programmers with that low-level knowledge may not want to put up with the diversity and HR nonsense.
Hard disagree with this analysis.
Your first hypothetical isn’t a hypothetical; you are describing the actual current state of most of AAA development.
Your second hypothetical is a complete non-issue in modern game development. The vast majority of today’s games are created using licensed game engines and prebaked assets. You don’t need chip-level knowledge to code a video game in 2022.
Somebody tell that to minecraft users.