Every so often this issue comes up, is the genre dead, I think it's because those games either take longer or need more people, or both. Development cycles are longer so subjectively, to us that love them, the genre seems to die between bouts of games.
But I think there is too much demand for them, even specialized, and even when some ideas get a bit tired or oddly done.
The question is not whether the games will die, for that to happen role playing would have to die, but rather where is it going?
Sadly, from my perspective, RPG's are most likely to save on development costs by going exclusively online, multiplayer. The reason for this is that very soon we will see all of these games come with editing options that allow individuals to carve out a piece of that online world and generate their own adventures. Imagine hopping into something like the World of Warcraft 2 someday and being able to create your own quests, even monsters via a point and click interface, for people, with some supervision, and run mini games within the online game. You could create your own NPC's, and even feed them dialog via your cell phone in response to triggers...
This is available technology right now and allows for a kind of replayability and cheap development that other rpg's would always lack.
The dialog and options will fall to massive numbers of players to flesh out naturally. Hopefully we can train them to stay on topic and in character <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
I do suspect that computer RPG's as we have known them will be dead in 1-2 game generations, or fall to a single publisher and perhaps series. Online games will be an interesting substitute, until....
AI software is able to generate stories and dialog "at random" but appropriate to quest and theme. That is not as far away as you might imagine. Within our lifetimes, one would suspect.
