Something I've learned from reading books is that the video game market had a pretty nasty crash back in the 80's. The cause of that crash? Not understanding why people played video games. The biggest problem in the gaming market today? Countless studios who don't understand why people play games.
If i remember correctly it had a lot to do with the quality of the home console games compared to the arcade games. Compare Atari's Pacman with the arcade version. Nintendo came along and their console games were much better compared to their arcade games ie Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Popeye.
I agree with the quality portion. Console bloat is part of that led to the crash. Someone who was in the game at the time claimed that there were over 100 developers who were pumping out games at an insane pace. He says that maybe 6 of those survived. Quality is still the problem...
look at live service games. Look at Sony's obsession with getting their own successful version of some live service slop. You would think they would learn from Concord straight up failing in less than a month would tell them no one wants it. Gen AI is causing problems too. Its a race to the bottom.
Back in the 80s a lot of companies that had nothing to do with electronics or entertainment got into making video games. Most had no idea what they were doing.
We are experiencing that now as well. A bunch of career executives hear that the video game market is a trillion dollar industry and come on over trying to apply their "spreadsheet math" to this market only for it to fail. They don't understand the market and flood it with trash because of that.
Yes, the market being flooded with low quality garbage caused both video game crashes; the 1979 and 1983 one. Guess they didn't learn their lesson the first time.
Third times the charm? I just hope that if we do get a crash it won't impact many indie devs.
There's that and the oversaturation of the market with shit product designed to make a quick buck above all else, case in point the many, many same-y live service shooters I definitely think we're in for a second crash sooner rather than later
Which is what happens when game dev studios are part of, or owned by corporations with investors and boards that only care about numbers going up.
Yep. They make video games by spreadsheet instead of learning. Theyre not aware that the brain dead tricks that works in other markets doesn't work here. I think a market crash might actually be good at this point. Give indies a chance to shine. Ive all but abandoned AAA games.
I agree. Every time one of the AAA shops fires waves of game devs, I look forward to seeing more smaller indy studios pop up. The better games are made by studios run by people that want to make something fun, not people looking to squeeze every penny they can out of a game release.
Exhibit A and B, Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3, we can add exhibit C with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, I didn't play that one though. Larian grew pretty quickly after Baldur's Gate 3 blew up, but Expedition 33 is a condemnation of every single lie AAA studios spit out about the costs of game dev
Someone has to fund the new indies, and that money ultimately comes from the same kinds of investors as AAA. We are seeing droves of indie closures or struggling to get funding indie studios.
Not every indie studio is going to succeed, but every single AAA studio is at a point where they are too big to fail. This is the problem with the market right now. AAA studios do whatever they want and we have to just take it. I'll stay with my indies thank you. Team Cherry seems to be doing fine.
Yep it was time warner after they bought Atari.
The video game crash was maybe 3 years. An oversaturated market full of games with very little differences between them most being a complete rip off of other games. I would put the blame on time warner, when they bought Atari, and just started cranking crappy games out as fast as they could.
Hear me out for a second. Maybe they should look back to the 80s games and see what worked. And try that for a while.
That's the problem. I'm guessing you're a bit younger. The crash happened in the 80's, I think 83 to be specific was when Atari took that landfill trip to dump all their games. When the games were discovered Atari filled it in with concrete after destroying any remaining carts. Bad games cause it.