Can the video game industry keep up with itself?  This is a question that has been on my mind a lot lately, looking at sales and budgets for the latest Triple-A games around the corner.  As games get more and more expensive to produce, we’re seeing a rapidly escalating notion of what quantifies a ‘success’ in terms of game sales.  Basically, for the top-tier games, a million units sold doesn’t cut it anymore, not by a long shot.  But what’s the problem here, are game developers moving too fast, or is the industry as a whole moving too slow? 

As gamers, we all like to see the envelope get pushed, with better and more cutting edge games being produced that consistently blow us away even more than the last big game.  It’s the “Bigger, Better, more Badass” mentality made famous by preview coverage of Gears of War 2. 

But what we forget is that more and more money is required to bring out these amazing games.  And with that, more and more sales are needed to make that money back. 

There are a number of problems that may originate from this.  If we as gamers continue to demand greater levels of quality on a technical level, game developers will not be able to take nearly as many risks to produce new content we might like.  They’re going to go with the safe bet, which is why we’re going to see more God of War and Mass Effect games beyond the original planned trilogies.  And when we do have the few gems that come from big budget new games(Batman: Arkham Asylum, Bioshock) we’re now guaranteed to see them exploited for a quicker sequel rather than letting these games exist as singular moments in the generation.

The other obvious problem is the proverbial ‘bubble’ problem that developers could face in the next few years.  While Wii Fit continues to sell to an uncharacteristically broad demographic, we haven’t seen much growth in the video game industry with the exception of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s unprecedented success.  Will we reach a breaking point where there simply isn’t enough of an audience to support certain games’ massive budgets?

The question is, can videogames become a big enough medium that the mainstream will adopt a game that isn’t Modern Warfare or Halo?  Until then, I fear that budgets need to be restricted to some degree until the industry as a whole is ready for a legitimate expansion and not a handful of games that happen to break outside the typical gamer demographic.