If I'm honest, very little of the way the industry is structured feels sustainable to me - budgets are increasing at a constant rate, but the audience isn't. In fact in some places it's probably even decline. Even with SAAS games, companies are still appealing to the same Core audience, they're simply making more money out of the players they've got rather then trying to grow the pool of potential buyers. The fact that the monetisation structure works so well helps to shield these games from the issue that comes from difference in budget growth to audience growth, but companies will be forced to become more and more aggressive to make up for that continuing divergence between budget growth and user growth.
With single player AAA games, that opportunity doesn't exist to begin with. Companies need to figure out some way of making these games sustainable, fast, or they simply won't exist in the future at all. The games are budgeted so that they will be profitable at $60, but that's the old model, and the old model increasingly doesn't work. $40 with the old model won't work either even if it increases the sales, because the increase probably won't make up the loss of the extra $10 for every sale. The fact is, some of these games are essentially doomed to becoming financial failures before production has even begun, because the model doesn't work. I think the only real solutions might be to somehow halt or reverse the budget increase, or trying to somehow get more people to play Core games. But both of those are difficult - the Core audience want the visual fidelity, game lengths and expansive worlds that are causing the budgets to increase so rapidly to begin with, and how does a game company, that only provides software, expand the audience that plays games when none of the hardware manufactures, bar perhaps Nintendo, seam to have any interest whatsoever in expanding the audience past the hardcore, 20-30 male dominated Western demographic? Truth be told I think the issues that are effecting single player games will eventually also begin to effect SAAS games, and the whole thing will probably implode within the next decade or so unless something is done about it. Parts of the industry are beginning to feel a bit like a ticking time bomb.
