Anonymous
08/07/2019 (Wed) 23:24:45
[Preview]
No.11820
del
The crash of 1983.
>Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Odyssey² and Intellivision all release their own consoles because holy shit vidya is a marketable thing now, each with its own huge library
>market has absolutely too many games for the consumer to make an informed decision
>stores are lending too much floor space to vidya
>personal computer prices are lowering, and better graphics + processing speed + memory increases interest in them, waning demand for consoles
>manufacturers over-project demand and sales, and pump out a surplus of consoles and games
>price wars between PCs and consoles forces console companies to reduce pricing to ridiculous lows
>sales slump and production is cut back mid-year, leaving a huge market gap around Christmas season
>the prior year, 1982, Activision had won a case settlement with Atari, who tried to block the ex-Atari employees from publishing any games; this legitimized 3rd-party game development
>after this case, the opening of several dozen new dev companies slammed Atari's ~75% market share of cartridge games
>these new companies are mostly inexperienced with game-making, and many resort to reverse engineering and industrial espionage to get by; even Atari gets in on the action, prompting a lawsuit from Mattel
>not many new games do anything new, and many that sell in quantity are copies of previously successful games
>stores don't have enough space for the glut of shovelware coming in, and start sending surplus back to the publishers
>publishers start going under left and right because they have no new products and no cash to issue refunds
>stores can't return surplus anymore and start bargain-binning these literal hundreds of trash games
>price of avg. game bottoms out from $35 to $5 (~$92 to ~$13 in 2018 dollars)
>many companies withdraw from video games entirely; many more close up shop permanently
TL;DR an industry worth $8.2 billion in today's money fell ass-over-teakettle for a 97% loss in under 2 years due to flooding the market with garbage games