I mean there are more games than there are hard core gamers to consume them, leading to many bankrupt studios even when in many cases they made a good product. The hardcore market hasn't expanded enough to support all the games out there in the old model, so the market has tried to adapt by consolidating many companies under one umbrella and vaporizing the rest. The idea was that a bunch of games could fail and it wouldn't matter since uber publisher presumed there would be one blockbuster amongst the 10 games uber publisher releases in a given year. The problem with that is that hardcore gamer expectations went up significantly, while the hardcore gamer market expanded only marginally (relatively speaking) and now you have the situation where even an uber publisher can fail and obliterate numerous companies in the process. The market is now trying to adapt to that primary by releasing more sure things, the COD 12's, Gears 7's, Assassin Creed 9's, etc, because they have to, it's the only semi predictable sales metric that they have. That works as long as each uber publisher has at least 1 such game which so far they do. Whether or not that model is sustainable I have no idea, but one has to wonder how long uber publishers will continue dumping 20 million dollars into each game when 8/10 aren't expected to make profit. Plus with so many games out there the need to buy a game at launch for $60 has greatly diminished, just wait a few months and get it for $30. I have no clue what the solution is to it all but it just all seems unsustainable to me, and it's a situation that I'm glad I'm no longer a part of.
