is the industry dying? serious question. $350 really isnt that much for a game console especially when u consider inflation rates. im sure consoles used to cost more past gens.
sony and ms have been bundling heavily, how much lower could they even go at this early stage.
There's an easier way to think about this:
1.) The expanded market is basically gone. That means all the extra people Nintendo reached are out in mobile land, as well as many young children.
2.) The b-tier market and the licensed game markets are also gone (and show up as a mix of downloadable, mobile, or f2p titles). This hurt handhelds a lot on top since b-tier games and licensed products made up many of their games, and that's before we even get to the meteoric impact of mobile there.
3.) The entertainment center market is largely gone with the advent of things like the Roku and the fact streaming has gotten vastly more popular so you don't need something for the newest disc format.
4.) This has basically left the people who buy major AAA games as far as retail goes. They're not a huge audience, but they buy a lot of software and large enough for the current setup, so publishers are happy with that.
Overall you're going to see a lot less hardware sold in aggregate, but the section of the industry we saw publishers cluster around still exists in a healthy (well, very polarized) state.
This is why most publishers are also investing heavily in digital, f2p, and/or mobile though. They know that the AAA market has limits, so if they want growth, that has to come from elsewhere.
This is also why the release calendar is pretty barren, since publishers aren't going to spend a ton of money on something with a high chance of failure.
