Bsrgvty

My question is not a duplicate of the existing question about translating "to be going to" to Russian, because the solutions suggested there (собираться, хотеть, etc.) do not seem to work in my case.

My question is this: How is the precise idea of the below sentence (1) elegantly expressed in Russian?

(1) This game is going to perish.

The rest of my post explains the context of this sentence, my motivation to ask this question, and my hopeless attempts to find a precise but elegant Russian translation. You can skip that and just suggest your translation variant, but reading my post in full may result in a translation variant better tailored to my needs.

Let me first explain the context. I am writing a short essay in Russian about one of our national strategy board games. The game is called 連珠, and its nature is somewhere between Go and chess. The main point of my essay is that the rules of that game are getting more and more complicated to address "loopholes" and have already become a highly sophisticated system of "patches." This makes novices strongly discouraged, because a lot of knowledge and understanding is required even to get started. With virtually no novices joining the game, almost all players who play in official tournaments in Japan are very experienced players who joined the game long ago, when the rules were much simpler and more natural and when there were much less alternative entertainment opportunities such as online poker. Sooner or later these players will drop out of the game for ageing and other reasons. If nothing changes before that, the game will collapse at that point.

The variant "игра умрет" is not what I looking for, because the idea of Sentence (1) is different from "this game will perish." The latter phrase is a just a prediction of the end result. What I want to say is something different: if things continue developing as they are developing, the game will cease to exist in the end. In other words, I am talking about a process(!) occurring now, namely the process of over-complicating the rules. The game is moving in the direction towards death, as a plane that entered into a tailspin is approaching the ground, and the process is very unlikely to change, although I cannot exclude that a creative solution will be found to salvage the game. In English, Sentence (1) elegantly expresses the idea.

Of course, I can easily compose a long sentence in Russian to express what I want to express, but I am curious to learn how I can express the idea elegantly or idiomatically, similar to the English sentence (1) in terms of conciseness and preciseness. If I can find an elegant variant, I can use it as the title of my essay.

I know that "to be going to" is often translated to Russian as "собираться", as pointed out in answers to the existing question about "to be going to," but it seems to be wrong or at least very weird to say "игра собирается умереть," because "собираться" is used to describe an intent or purpose.

I also dismissed the variant "игра умирает," because there is a difference between "the game is dying" and "the game is going to die." The difference is the same as between "he is dying" and "he is going to die." The expression "he is dying" implies that the person is in the very process of dying, e.g., with bleeding wounds and in agony, whilst a person who is going to die may be quite healthy and just doing something that will kill him in the distant future. For example, when the German soldiers invaded Russia in June 1941, they were going to die, but were not dying. What I want to say is that the game IS GOING to perish, not that it is perishing or dying. It is a long way to the death of the game, and the number of active players is currently almost not changing, as the drop-out rate is currently almost zero.

I also dislike the option "игру ждет смерть," because this variant does not refer to the current process and thus seems to be merely an artistic way of saying "the game will die."

Being at a total loss as to how translate Sentence (1), I humbly hope that wise native Russian speakers can kindly help such a poor student as I am by telling me what grammatical or lexical solution is there in the Russian language for such situations.

UPDATE: Попробую сказать по-русски, что именно я хочу от вас. Я хочу фразу со значением "если так пойдёт и дальше, то рано или поздно игра умрёт," но коротко, как Предложение (1), и к тому же без утери точного значения. Я хочу ёмкость и точность для заголовка сочинения. Я не хочу выразить, что игра точно умрёт. Я хочу выразить, что игра к этому "идёт". Чтобы избежать смерти игры, людям надо вовремя увидеть проблему и найти решение её. Но не очень вероятно, что они это сделают. Прошу прощения за вероятные ошибки в вашем прекрасном языке, но я очень сильно старалась обойтись без них.

Inspired by your "snowball" analogy - "рэндзю катится в пропасть" or even "катится ко всем чертям" if you want to be extra expressive..

Also, катиться можно в тартарары, к катастрофе и т.д.

If it's a title of an essay it is currently notoriously popular (read - clichéd) among Russian journalists to use a highly expressive phrase ending with a question mark. Something like: "Рэндзю при смерти?", "Последние дни Рэндзю(?)" and similar bullshit. Not recommended.

PS:
Myself I'd rather choose "Как нам реорганизовать Рэндзю?", which actually fits the topic quite well as far as I can judge (see the origin, though Google shows that this allusion trick has already been used too. ))

Here are possible versions varying in strength of expression:

Эта игра может прекратить своё существование.

Под угрозой само существование этой игры.

Эта игра - на пути к полному исчезновению.

Эта игра обречена на полное забвение.

Эта игра может навсегда исчезнуть.

Со временем этой игры не станет.

"Пошел обратный отсчет до практически неизбежной гибели этой игровой дисциплины" seems to be a pretty good way for expressing of your idea. "Пошел обратный отсчет" implies that there is a a process of awaiting of a disaster, however it doesn't directly say that this disaster is gradually developing. This phrase compares the disaster with a time bomb that is going to detonate, thus it has such a meaning. "Практически неизбежной" reflects that we are more than sure that it is likely to happen, however it also leaves a small chance for some "divine intervention". "Гибель" is just a synonym for "смерть" that better fits the context.

https://ru.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BD%D1%83%D1%82%D1%8C

"Игровая дисциплина" emphasizes the competitive nature of this game.

EDIT:
Another option that might be a better fit is "Игра медленно, но неумолимо приближается к своему закату". Dawn symbolizes the death of the game and "приближается" literally translates as "is going to" or "approaches". "Медленно, но неумолимо" expresses the inevitably of the result of the process and the slowness of the process itself. It's worth noting that even though this phrase subtly compares the life cycle of the game with the cycle of yawn and dawn, it has a really weak connection to the idea of 24 hours and is commonly used for processes which take many years.