What makes this a bit hard to pin down is that around 2009 was also the (re)start of indie gaming. Xbox Summer of Arcade started in 2008, Humble Bundle and Stea

What makes this a bit hard to pin down is that around 2009 was also the (re)start of indie gaming. Xbox Summer of Arcade started in 2008, Humble Bundle and Steam Greenlight followed in the next few years and ever since we had an enormous mass of high quality indie games available. So even with AAA gaming starting to go downhill around 2009, gaming as a whole did actually quite well.