Borderlands was, in no doubt, the sleeper hit of 2009.  

Garnering a wide variety of respect, it broke down major doors in the RPG genre, including engaging combat, an unfathomable amount of weapons to choose from, and an extremely unique art design. Accomplishing all this in the most over-played setting: the wasteland.

In other words, the apocalypse portion being the cause and the wasteland being the effect.

This theme is in the beginning stages of being rejected by the people. It's everywhere. Movies, video games, graphic novels and novels. Movies such as The Book of Eli, and The Road, are some of the most recent, showing great similarity to games such as Fallout 3 and Metro 2033. Broken down turnpikes, and dark gloomy clouds linger close in contrast to the open settings. In almost every wasteland/apocalypse piece of media, people are free to do as they please, as long as they're the most powerful. Be it bandit folk, or mutants of challenging kind, there's always trouble brewing. And  you're put at the butt's end of it.

This aura of, "Oh God, there's no way this is going to end well," set's the scene up to make these frequent situations turn out in your favor. Because you (seemingly) have no way of getting to safety, this end has a chance for a more definitive lasting impression, and a more memorable ending. Imagine you've just fallen out of a helicopter at 5,500 feet; 30 seconds later you're living life in a hot-tub accompanied by Megan Fox. Now you have a crazy story to tell.

That sounds pretty remarkable to me, but nothing can last forever. With more games on the horizon (i.e. Fallout: New Vegas, Rage) people are going to start to ask, "Again?" And because this genre transcends to all different forms of media, the relativity factor will wear off at an exponentially faster rate.

The death of the apocalypse will happen on consumer's command. If a producer says, "I want you guys to think wasteland!" the developers are going to say, "alright." The theme will only die when the consumer end says no more via sales figures. And it will only take one flop to do this.

After titles such as Fallout: New Vegas and Rage hit the shelves they will mostly likely attract popularity, on the bases they have a respectable series going, or a respectable dev team taking the wheel. Consumer's can be seen to be so pleased with a new found video game love, they will crave more, causing developers to attempt to churn out more, seeking loyal apocalypse fans with a 5 dollar bill attached to a string.

Apocalypse titles will be increasingly produced and consumer's will say, "I'm bored," and in turn cease to buy these games. One game to be poorly crafted and they'll only get turned off.

When an appeal wears off, the game, book, or movie genre will decrease in activity and fade away only too be a good, distant memory.

While the appocalypse does have some truly unique mechanic systems, consumer's can only take so much and players will settle on just their favorite choice in order to get their wasteland fix. Availability of a theme is found devastating. If people like to play multi-player online shooters, they generally set on one of the main options, as time savers and for the sake of simplicity. This does not neccesarily mean the wasteland will die, it's just that, as more and more are produced, one will rise to the first place podium, and as a result, producers will turn away from one genre and churn the water of another early one.