The AAA-only publishers are too big to 'crash' per se, but they've been demonstrating business incompetence for years. Best example is EA. You know how I talk about how in theory a company that makes one-size-fits-all products will get slowly picked apart by combinations of niche companies and large competitors who subdivide their production to target as many segments as possible? EA is a case in point. EA's share price has been going steadily down for years - there's been the occasional lift, but overall you look at their share chart over the past decade, put it against the share market as a whole, and you see a company in what looks like steep irreversible decline.
An insight into the reason for this came from the Biodoc who said 'TOR didn't affect EA's share price - we'd have to be 10 times our size to even come close to moving the EA shar eprice one way or the other'. It's typical of an attitude that Warren Spector noted when EA bought Ultima - they keep trying to find the 'big megahit' that will be the entire answer to their long-term decline in share value. They're looking for a miracle - a CoD-but-bigger-selling hit that they can sell to the entire gaming market and get that share price up.
Compare this to industries and companies that are true masters of capitalism. Note that I don't actually like these companies or their practices, and I'm really glad that Walmart never managed to get a foothold in Australia with our higher minimum wage and welfare state. But, when it comes to succeeding at capitalism, they're a great example - they're much bigger than EA, and yet they will scrounge for every little penny they can. If they can pay someone less and organise the store in a way that they don't need good employees (and hence don't need decent wages), they will - even if it's only a fraction of a percent of their profit. They'll sell products at a loss in order to prevent their customers from going elsewhere, even if those customers would end up only making them a few cents each after the loss-leading is taken into account. They'll milk every product they can, in every region they can. They will stomp on whatever corpse they need to in order to scrounge every tiny penny they can. And by making that the centre of their culture, they succeed despite never having a CoD equivalent - they aren't looking for some miracle, they're just damn determined to pick up every penny and rob every corpse in the knowledge that if they can do that all over the US it will eventually add up to an improved share price.
If a Walmart exec was to say 'let's drop that product line - it only makes us $200,000 a year', they'd be out of a job. The CEO would tell the guy that he should be milking everything out of the mainstream AND every litttle piece of profit they can find, no matter how small it is (because since when was it an 'either/or' thing? Why do AAA publishers think 'we don't want to make a game with a safe $200,000 profit because we want to go for the centre of the market and make a $100,000,000 profit', when they should instead be making as many of those multi-billion dollar games as possible UNTIL THE MARKET IS SATURATED and then go grab that extra $200,000 AS WELL. Once they adopt that attitude, they might find that there's actually a whole host of untapped markets worth $200,000 each, which might end up making the difference between long-term profit and long-term decline.
Which is why in the 'real world' of business (not the bullshit from 'game journalism') EA and half the other major publishers are in long-term decline. They've forgotten how to scrounge. Now that might be good for their employees, as they're less likely to be aggressively overworking and underpaying them. But niche markets, or even broad segments (I put the Codex in the latter category - there wasn't any 'crpg crash' that forced the decline, and there's little reason to assume that there isn't a sizeable market segment for those games) benefit from ruthless competition. And if you're an investor who wants to buy retail stocks and who actually does your research, and you see that the game industry has a clusterfuck of companies going for the mass market with no attention paid to other segments, you're going to avoid those shares like the plague and instead buy into a retailer that knows to scrounge for every penny and exploit any potential market.
Hence even compared to the rest of the struggling US/European shares, many of the large game publishers are in long-term decline. Oddly enough, the best thing that someone like EA could do is actually hire more execs from OUTSIDE the gaming industry - i.e. hire guys from genuinely cut-throat competitive markets, who are going to squeeze every penny from any game genre they can think of.
