Parts of G1 will be around as long as Transformers exists as a brand. Like them or not the live action movies catapulted Bumblebees, Optimus and Megatron into the limelight once again and made them household names for the first time since the 80's. Hasbro will just keep reinventing the core characters over and over again as companies like Marvel do with their core heroes. I seriously doubt we will ever see a new Transformers story that doesn't involve Optimus or Bumblebee.

The core characters will endure though this G1 renaissance may start to fade in time when the buying power of the current g1 fans declines, new generations will no doubt still want more Optimus and co, but I imagine the ancillary characters (IE: pretty much everyone who hasn't been in 3 live action movies) will start to fade.

Already I think they are pushing the G1 thing maybe a little too far with some of those forced repaints, like the Combiner Wars Autobot cars. other than Scattershot and Armada Megatron they are the only Combiner Wars toys I've shelf warm.

Anyway while I'm happy that there are so many nostalgia miners at work with G1, it would be nice to see something new in Transformers again, Beast Wars was cool because it was a little bit different to what came before but still linked to it. It seems like we are trapped in various iterations of the same thing now.