Yeah I saw the Gamestops status update as well, & personally I hope the industry begins to decline again, its peripherals like PS Move & the Kinect that makes gaming accessible to non gamers, & personally I'd prefer if more concentration & effort was put into more hardcore games than the shitty shovelware of the Wii & aforementioned peripherals.
Valid points, but, if there weren't casual games, there wouldn't be hardcore games. There would be just "games". I guess we need the shovelware to appreciate the true "art". But, realistically, most developers and publishers only care about the demographic, which are either teenage boys, eight-year old children, and college kids who spend way too many hours on facebook. Though, there are games that come out every year or so that go above and beyond that, such as Portal 2, Uncharted 2, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which I know can be debated, God of War, going back to Super Mario Bros. I think that gaming is on a road that's good and bad. Before, in the 1990s, I guess, it was very neutralized. People were either happy with what they had, or didn't know what they wanted. The games then were all relatively level with each other, when it came to whether it was hardcore or casual. Now, it's either you are a casual gamer, mainstream gamer, or hardcore gamer. Same with games. Game development is going down two roads: extremely casual games (Angry Birds and other Apps), and extremely hardcore games (L. A. Noire, among others). But, there is also the mainstream game, which is seperated from the previous catergories, as they can be either of the two.
Basically, my point is that in the future, games are going to be frivolous games AND art, but must be decided on a case-by-case basis, as you can't call an entire medium art or not.