[rtf]

Some random thoughts, as a game developer:

AAA games as we know them will peak and then decline. The PC is inexorably moving towards a fully open-standard platform on which DRM-laden products cannot work. Consoles don't suffer the same problem, but by cutting themselves off from an open world and locking the hardware specs at a fixed low level, they force development costs considerably higher. The Wii points to a future console market that seeks disruptive hardware innovations over a market-share battle, but development costs mean that third parties will have few incentives to participate in such a market.

Also, games with a large engineering scope have an astonishingly poor track record. Games with a high content scope are much more likely to succeed.