this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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When will the next "E.T." moment happen in the industry? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 days ago by Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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Back in the 80's, Atari had a monopoly of games and charged absurd amounts of money for titles that pretty much had no quality control. The cost of each cartridge would easily go over $100 in today's money and gamers began to pull back on purchasing anything. This eventually culminated in the infamous E.T. movie tie in that led to pallets of its unsold cartridges ending up in a landfill and crashing the industry.

Now that Nintendo's signaled to the rest of the industry it's okay to sell digital titles at $80 each, how soon do you see gamers collectively hold back on their purchases that will eventually collapse the AAA market? Will the current trade war play a role in the hardware side of things with the collapse? Will all major companies save Nintendo suffer the downturn?

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[–] missingno@fedia.io 24 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The Atari crash was just Atari. In North America - and only North America, things were quite different elsewhere in the world - Atari was virtually the entire game industry at the time, but that isn't the case today.

We already do see individual developers and publishers crash the way Atari did. All the time. But for every flop, there are a dozen hits. The industry is big, and it is not a monolith. And the audience is far far far larger. People will always be buying games. It's not possible for the entire industry to crash the way Atari did.

It'd be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It’d be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash.

Which can happen.

Theaters sure aren't doing well. Movies soldier on without them, but with vanishing distinction from any other form of streaming video. When the superhero genre wanes, it might not be because some other bajillion-dollar trend overtook it. People can just stop caring enough to justify budgets with nine digits. What comes after that is a fallow period. Many large investments fail, capital dries up, a few pricks make headlines for declaring 'movies are over.'

There's been several times that making money on music was not a reliable business model. The industry flipped out about piracy... on cassettes, and then also when MP3s came along. Fortunately they solved that through commercial streaming services which also don't pay artists anything. And now you can install a program that invents and records pop songs, just for you, in about as long as it takes to play them.

Even in '83, it's not like Atari died. They had two more consoles that decade, plus a handheld. They marched on into the 1990s and then died. The crash simply meant a whole form of entertainment was no longer an expected feature in people's lives.

Subscription MMOs have dwindled. The RTS genre crashed.

[–] missingno@fedia.io 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But none of those are entire industries crashing. Audiences change, media changes how it targets audiences, business models change, but the medium still lives.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

Again, not even Atari itself went away entirely. A crash means line go down. It's not a sudden and definite end.