And all it took was permanently damaging video games as a medium!
The way I see it there's about 2, maybe 3 major divergent points for gaming over the last 16 years, the first is if the PS3 hadn't sucked, the second is if Wil Wright's Spore had turned out better, we'd be living in an entirely different gaming climate today, the third is if carpet baggers like Sarkeesian hadn't showed up.
In the lead up to the 7th gen there was a ton of potential for gaming to go mainstream, instead most of that audience went to the Wii where it was just a passing fad, had they been playing better, more complicated experiences on the PS3, there's no telling what might have happened.
Instead we got the worst of both worlds, gaming went just mainstream enough to allow carpet baggers like Sarkeesian to show up, but not mainstream to the point where it would have been harder for people like that to pull off their grift.
But just in general had the PS3 been a friendlier environment for devs, there's no telling what games might have been made.
I feel like there are so many other occurrences that lead to gaming’s downfall than PS3 bad and Spore bad. I would say an avalanche of poor decisions and circumstances, a lot built off of previous generations, are what caused gaming to suck. Here would be the ones I would look at:
1) The FPS boom. The end of the sixth gen formed a new titan for the gaming industry to contend with, that being Halo. The online multiplayer FPS took gaming by storm and soon everyone would try to copy, Sony going in with Killzone. Call of Duty was also a rising name. By the middle of the 7th gen, it was clear that FPS was the most profitable genre, causing the gaming industry to move towards over-saturating the market with them. Smaller projects and other genres would sort of be sidelined for one genre to rule all.
2) Hardcore gamers. Following the FPS craze, came the Hardcore crowd which only furthered helped in limiting what gaming was capable of. This crowd pushed gaming to just be FPS COD/Halo crap with little in between. This crowd would also start attacking “baby” games, primarily Nintendo. If you want an explanation for why Nintentards are so tribal and only play Nintendo games, here is why. Nintendo fans broke off from the gaming community to make their stand against “fake” games like the FPSs causing them to worship Nintendo as their god and become as secluded as their opponents.
3) The 20 year mark. Gaming at the time was hitting its 20 year mark, meaning Nostalgia for the 8-bit and 16-bit eras took hold. After AVGN we started getting more Retro types to come out and speak about how we need to regress the medium back to the good ol days.
4) Disrespect for casual titles. With the Wii and DS, casuals finally started playing games as Nintendo offered a plethora of new ways to use gaming. They created simple sports titles anyone can understand, cooking games, simulators, games aimed at girls, etc.. Nintendo tried their best to really expand what gaming was at the time to lure in people of all ages. The problem was the gamer audience did not view these as real games, or anything to be expanded on. Once again, it seems the mindset of what makes a real video game just hinders any growth in the industry. All these new genres would get regulated to phones soon enough and take away the new audience from pc or consoles till the Switch. Hate on Fitness Boxing all you want, but this is how games become mainstream, not just shoving more complex experiences onto people.
5) Graphics whoring. Having good graphics has always been a thing, but it took a negative turn come the HD era. The results of HD was higher costs. Higher costs meant less risk and less small studios popping up, hence why this era lacked the more compelling titles of the sixth gen that you spoke about Dom.
6) Focus on Western Devs over Japanese
7) DLC and online becoming a thing
The list could probably go on…