Hopefully Carlsen's becoming the FIDE World Champion will be loud in the media and will bring back the popularity of chess into our times.
Chess will never be the same again.
What i mean is that a huge majority of gifted athletes will not be going into track and field. The best athletes aren't pro runners. I'm not saying that there aren't great runners who are athletes, just that soccer, and basketball will be taking a lot of the talent away from track.
Same is true of chess. Best gameplayers are not deciding to go into chess. It is a very minor game, like rugby. I would even think that Poker has more strategic talent than Chess does.
When exactly does someone like a Carlsen (Norway) or Anand (India), as "gameplayers", choose to go into a different game than chess?
As an example, I used to play chess when I was younger. Plenty of people later took up things like poker and starcraft, and a few became quite successful at it. These people were generally not the best chess players, instead they were more likely to be average / slightly above average (for being serious club players) in chess.
Today, the game is poker.
It appears that NL is close to falling too, if it hasn't already: http://www.pokersnowie.com/
Furthermmore, known bots have been winning at mid-high stakes from at least a few years, and have taken millions from online poker rooms.
Lots of discussion about pokersnowie here: http://www.deucescracked.com/forums/131-Poker-Theory/topics/...
Most of the experts agree that it's very strong.
Human competition is about humans competing against each other. Machines, computers or animals being better than humans doesn’t really figure into it.