I'm being pedantic here, but Activision makes CoD. EA makes Battlefront.

The annual COD and Battlefield both run into production delays. EA decides to crunch out COD so as to have something in the Q4 season and delays BF until after the holiday season. COD is unstable and very poorly reviewed. Investors start to freak out about RoI and the ballooning development costs of these enormous games. The industry contemplates what would happen if they cut dev costs to limit their risk. Pundits announce that the era of AAA is over and games enthusiasts start to question the idea of Pre-orders.

But, sales are fine because it's CoD and people buy it on name alone. And besides, there's always Madden. Yeah, I think Cody's right. The expensive stuff is all buttressed with the other AAA stuff from these conglomerate publishers.

CoD is Activision, not EA.
But there was an interesting event this season, where EA put out BF1, and then followed up quickly with Titanfall 2 (which is arguably a better game with a more consumer-friendly design). Being the first out of the gate, BF1 saw great sales, while Titanfall 2 did not, and the annual CoD that released weeks later also saw a significant sales decrease from the previous year.

Why EA would dump Titanfall 2 in between these two major releases in anyone's guess, but word is that they were trying to pull people away from CoD by giving them two very different shooters at once, and it seems to have worked. Activision seems none the worse for wear though, as Black Ops 3 DLC and Rise of Iron were the top downloaded add-ons for PS4 in 2016, so I doubt they'll have to worry about any "crash" any time soon...

It's a weird time in gaming, for sure, but nothing looks even remotely bleak (with 6.2 million PS4s sold during Holiday sales alone (Microsoft has been completely mum about their sales figures, from what I can find), I think consumer confidence is pretty high right now.

The company most likely to be involved would seem to be Microsoft. They've killed off a number of big-buzz studios and games over the past few years, from Ensemble Studios to Lionhead studios, to smaller companies such as Press Play and the handful of poor saps that were stuck developing Kinect titles. Heck, just today, they confirmed the cancellation of Platinum's "Scalebound", which was looking to be Microsoft's answer to Sony's "Horizon: Zero Dawn"...

Microsoft also tested the waters (well, more like dove in belly-first) to see how much they could impose on consumers by forcing them to buy Kinect 2.0, which failed miserably, and directly contributed to nearly 1:3 console sales against Sony (and which ultimately didn't help their investment in the Kinect, which died slowly, to the dismay of nobody but the investors). Not sure how much they lost in the gamble, but the shuttering of all of those prominent games and studios would put them closer to a crash than any other company (a console crash, if nothing else, since most of their "exclusives" are making their way to PC now), regardless of a crash being highly unlikely.

You brought up a two different points: 1) Xbox One didn't sell as well as PS4 and 2) MS closed some studios, but I don't think either of these things counts as a crash in the traditional sense. Consoles are still selling for full price, or close enough. Closing a studio when it is not financially viable seems fiscally responsible as opposed to a bubble-then-bust crash. Additionally, Microsoft is big enough and has enough other stuff going on that they could just leave the games market completely and they would continue to be a profitable company. If this happened, it could create space in the market for other companies to flourish.

Since this question was posted, I've read a bit about the financial aspects of the video game market in general. I've found a lot of conflicting financial reports which makes analysis kind of hard to do.

Supposedly video games started making more money per year than the music and movies industries in the mid-2000s. According to some inflation-adjusted numbers I found, video game industry revenue has not fluctuated wildly in either direction since the mid 1990s.

On the wikipedia page about the crash, it claims that after the crash the market was selling at a 97% reduction in volume. That is really hard to imagine right now, and again--I found some numbers that completely contradicted that figure.

There are lots of installed Xbox Ones and even more PS4s, tons of PC gamers, people who play games on their phones, and some handheld systems still kicking around.

The 1980s crash was attributed to the hardware companies not having any kind of authority over who was making software for their systems, combined with games taking up too much physical retail space. Both of those situations are much different now. There are lots of digital downloads and almost all games released are heavily regulated by the companies, with high-cost barriers to entry on the consoles ensuring serious game candidates.

So my answer to the original question is: I don't think a similar crash would happen any time soon. The market is much more diversified, much larger, and much more entrenched in popular culture.

Schooly, what do you think? What made you pose this question?