Well, I think people recognize the differance in quality between a $60 game and $1 shovelware.
The issue here isn't that the future of gaming is uncertain, or that there is a problem with the current development of real games, it's that an increasingly corperate mentality is looking towards what other guys are making, as opposed to what they are already making. It's about the pursuit of the biggest pile of money they can make at any given time, and the progession of the medium and where it could go is really increasingly irrelevent to the people involved, other than as something for developers to sound off about as part of marketing hype.
The basic attitude is that console manufacturers might make a couple billion over the lifetime of a console, but if they can make as much money, faster, by doing nothing by focusing on crap like "Farmville", that's where they are going to go.
To be honest the entire thing is very similar (though by no means identical) to what caused the video gaming crash in the 1980s. Everyone got fixated on shoveling out cheap, low-quality games, to the point where they became the standard as opposed to an "also ran" or something "in addition to". As a result people stopped taking gaming seriously and finding ot worthwhile. That's a potential problem here, of course all of the developers want to be the guys churning out the shovelware and leaving the innovation and big budget games to other developers that will make less money and they can ride on the coattails of. Eventually there will be no coattails to ride on, and that's when things will collapse. Getting too greedy and trying to double or triple the actual asking price for a game, one microtransaction or DLC at a time is also counter productive, because after a while people will catch on, and an industry used to these kinds of things won't be able to adapt to people simply refusing to pay in to those kinds of gimmicks, especially as they become increasingly transient and less worthwhile.
One of the big differances between this upcoming crash, if it happens, and the previous one, is going to simply be that with everything going digital and being stored in clouds, you aren't going to have people burying large piles of durable plastic cartridges... so at least the enviromentalists will be happy.
Likewise, while kind of morbid, there are some people I don't like in the industry. I can't help but wonder how many times Bobby Kotick would bounce if he threw himself off a building upon realizing he was ruined and would have to get a real job, similar to the "raining executives" after the stock market crash that caused "The Great Depression". Of course it probably won't actually come to that no more than it did after the .com crash, and Bobby in paticular is probably someone with a bunch of money stashed out in the Caiman islands. He seems like one of the corperate villains who might lose, but would still fly out into the sunset on his private jet to spend the rest of his days being waited on by gorgeous native women in bikinis oiling up his aging flesh and serving him drinks in hollowed out fruit with those little umbrellas all day.
