this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
0 points (50.0% liked)

Games

20209 readers
839 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
0
When will the next "E.T." moment happen in the industry? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
7 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The GAAS crashouts are the modern equivalent. Shareholders were sold the idea of "our own Fortnite! Infinite money forever!". What they got was Concord. Anthem. Marathon. There'll still be cash-grab GAAS out there, but eventually investors are going to put it together that it's not a safe gamble.

But unlike the ET "moment", video games as an industry, product, and art medium are here to stay. Making the things is too accessible now for the entire concept to ever be at risk again. The ET moment didn't just threaten Atari, it threatened the concept of home consoles. Trying to imagine a single steaming pile of shit or even industry trend "threatening video games" now is like imagining a movie so bad that it kills cinema. Even if every single shareholder-backed games studio got rugpulled tomorrow, there are plenty of other studios out there to pick up the slack.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Concord was the biggest flop of all time and people already forgot about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

I think we are still in the middle of the crash, but concord is a pretty good marker for the death of live service game spam. The number of canceled games since then has been impressive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean, it's already happening. AAA games are less common, and aren't doing as well as they used to, and the AAA studios are drying up. In its place, we're getting more indie games, more games from small development companies, and they all come at cheaper prices.

Consoles aren't immune to that, they're just delayed in their reaction, because the barrier for entry is higher for indie developers. But the prices that people are willing to pay on PC games isn't going up, because there are plenty of non AAA options available for less, and as that becomes normalised, expensive consoles will falter. Their flagship games will command a premium, but they won't be able to build up the game library they need to stay competitive with the PC market.

And don't forget, Steamdeck and the like are out there now, which directly challenge the niche that the Switch sits in.

I don't think we'll get a "moment", but I think the trend will end in a similar way

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Just a correction, AAA games aren't less common. We are getting more and more indies, but we are also getting more AAA games than ever. It's possible that percentage of AAA games compared to indie games has changed, but that is because of increased indie output.

Don't have any official stats, but as someone who keeps an eye on upcoming games, there are tons of AAA games coming out pretty much every year.