The market is large enough that I don't see why its important in any way. If one company you like has a major failure or even gets bought out by a larger firm,

The market is large enough that I don't see why its important in any way. If one company you like has a major failure or even gets bought out by a larger firm, there are a lot of alternatives who can compete for your time and attention. What constitutes a 'rough couple years' for the market? The guard changed and like hollywood, the accountants and inbred corporate boards are in charge forevermore. Massive gamer expectations don't exist in a vacuum, they exist because the AAA game space is heavily marketing for the purpose of building hype and expectation. It's on purpose. once in a while there's an anthem or cyberpunk level implosion but why do they care when they're raking in billions in microtransactions? That's just the cost of doing business. The companies release incomplete low content games because people keep buying them and the profit is massive. There's too much money to be made in microtransactions and repeat fees like season passes. There have been a few large notable failures but their net loss is much smaller than the massive income through microtransactions. We will never return to a 'sustainable market' because the market is all about companies trying both the existing things and new things to maximize profit and minimize cost, and others copying. The market is thus always in tumult and is never sustainable, with some firms failing and some firms succeeding at different times based on the ebb and flow of whatever the current events are at the time.