It will hit a point anyway.

This is not the first mass customer rebellion against the gaming industry.

Remember E.T. for the Atari 2600. The game itself wasn't absolutely terrible, for the time. But it was just a result of having so many shovelware games thrust out that consumers didn't care anymore. They just quit buying.

The practice of relying on a handful of whales does somewhat isolate developers from this practice. Whales are, after all, the most dedicated of consumers, and will hang on longer than most.

But part of the idea of the system is that whales need other players. Without a solid community of non-whales serving as content, whales get bored and stop buying.

If the trend of driving away regular customers to get bigger and bigger returns from the whales continues, it will hit a point where there aren't enough regular customers to keep the whales coming, and that exodus will slam the pocketbook of companies like EA hard.

That's the real reason why EA is going through hoops trying to keep people buying right now. They don't care about the lost $60 sales, because they're changing the income stream to rely on thousands from a handful of specific players, who aren't going to care about this mess. But if there's a mass player exodus, the game community won't be large enough to interest the whales, and that revenue stream will collapse.