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?
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.
When we start making games with our hands again.
Well, I’m kinda curious how much longer home consoles are going to hang on.
Nintendo is releasing their second generation handheld. The Steam Deck is quite popular, and the rest of the PC gaming industry has been scrabbling to match it. Meanwhile, the PS5…exists and what’s an Xbox even for anymore?
People like to say consoles will continue to exist because they’re so much simpler than PCs to “just play” on, but that’s not really true anymore. My parents’ Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing. We’re in a different world than when I was a kid, when I could really get a game, plug it in the SNES, flip the switch and it runs.
I could see Microsoft and Sony having an Atari or Sega moment. Exiting the hardware market, shutting down their platform, becoming a relatively minor game studio occasionally remembering to make a game in a property they haven’t published in awhile, like Atari putting out an Alone In The Dark game every 1.5 decades or so.
what’s an Xbox even for anymore?
PC-ifying the console market, same as always. A task it has almost completed.
Sony exiting the console market would be failure. They’ve been using the PS1 playbook five times in a row - seven or eight if you count handhelds - and it’s worked, at most, thrice. Sony’s ideal market has games developed for a specific platform, and occasionally ported outside it, so each vibrant fiefdom has its own identity and culture. That made them a mountain of cash on PS1 and PS2 and then nearly killed the PS3.
Developers’ ideal market is making the game once and selling it to all customers. Platforms are an obstacle. Sony’s ideal was fucked as soon as RenderWare looked the same on any console or PC. Microsoft got the message and made the 360 a generic compiler target. Sony almost shipped the PS3 without a real GPU. It took them years to stop fucking around and offer libraries to make their tiny special supercomputer act like any other computer - and that got them better ports, and made them more money.
What followed was two and a half generations of lockstep releases for near-identical AMD laptops. You can buy the blue one or the green one. Yet I don’t think Sony really internalized what’s happened until the Helldivers situation. They suddenly demanded every PC player get in their console ecosystem, because they recognized how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them.
Microsoft exiting the console market would be… what they’ve been planning for a decade, probably. Somewhere after the Xbox One, I mused that they could upset the console race by not releasing an Xbox Two, and just treat the upcoming PS5 as a slightly broken PC. They seem to be getting around to it. Albeit with a side of releasing a Steam Deck competitor, because they love showing up late to a trend.
I propose we call Microsoft’s portable Xbox a “Xune.”
I do miss the era when you just put the thing in the thing-shaped socket and the thing just worked.
Now you cannot do anything without setting accounts, downloading things, updating things and accepting tons of unread documents.
Or maybe I’m just getting old.
Increasingly, the software published on disc or cartridge is incomplete or unfinished, because there is pressure from management to ship retail products on time, but game development is hard, so the dev team will use the time during manufacturing and distribution of discs or cartridges to write patches, which will be automatically downloaded when the game runs. And it’s getting to the point that the cartridge or disc just functions as a license key. Maybe some of the game’s assets will be stored there but not the complete game, as they’ll still require large downloads to function.
I’ve been a Nintendo + PC gamer my entire life; basically anything I’ve ever wanted to play was available with that combo…and I’m ditching Nintendo.
My parents’ Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing.
Two-fold problem: a) give the consumer freedom of choice b) make it difficult enough to successfully set it up once, and then stay locked in
That’s both by accident (provide freedom choice) and by design (lock them as long as possibile).
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.
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.
But none of those are entire industries crashing. Audiences change, media changes how it targets audiences, business models change, but the medium still lives.
Again, not even Atari itself went away entirely. A crash means line go down. It’s not a sudden and definite end.
The E.T. moment is overhyped and a US phenomenon. It never happened in Europe or Japan, for example. Everybody seems to think that the video game crash of 1983 nearly killed the video game industry and that the NES was responsible for reviving it while Europe had a vibrant home computer scene on their Commodores, BBC Micros, Sinclairs and others with games that were better than everything on the 2600.
So what you might see is a crash in certain segments of the market and that happens quite often: There is nobody really releasing new MMORPGs anymore. Single Player FPS have crashed hard and now see a small revival by indie devs. For a while nobody did classic Point’n’Click adventures.
Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can’t afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience
Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can’t afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience
Also, there’s not as much value in high-powered GPUs right now because these days high-end graphics often mean Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is excellent for static and slow-moving graphics but has a tendency towards visible artifacts in situations where the picture and especially the camera position changes quickly (especially since it’s heavily reliant on TAA). These artifacts are largely independent of how good your GPU is.
Unlike in previous generations, going for high-end graphics doesn’t necessarily mean you get a great visual experience – your games might look like smeary messes no matter what kind of GPU you use because that’s how modern engines work. Smeary messes with beautiful lighting, sure, but smeary messes nonetheless.
My last GPU upgrade was from a Vega 56 to a 4080 (and then an XTX when the 4080 turned out to be a diva) and while the newer cards are nice I wouldn’t exactly call them 1000 bucks nice given that most modern games look pretty bad in motion and most older ones did 4K@60 on the Vega already. Given that I jumped three generations forward from a mid-tier product to a fairly high-end one, the actual benefit in terms of gaming was very modest.
The fact that Nvidia are now selling fancy upscaling and frame interpolation as killer features also doesn’t inspire confidence. Picture quality in motion is already compromised; I don’t want to pay big money to compromise it even further.
If someone asked me about what GPU to get I’d tell them to get whatever they can find for a couple hundred bucks because, quite frankly, the performance difference isn’t worth the price difference. RT is cool for a couple of days but I wouldn’t spend much on it either, not as long as the combination of TAA and upscaling will hide half of the details behind dithered motion trails and time-delayed shadows.
What crashed and brought back was gaming consoles.
No one releases MMO’s? anymore? Dune’s MMO just dropped last week.
We used to have 1-2 “wow killers” every year. The last one that tried was new world in 2021, afaik. So I’m pretty sure they were referring to MMORPGs, not MMOs in general. Altho even those are fewer nowadays than before, I feel.
I’m assuming it was hyperbole, not literal.
This user struggles with absolutes.
The thing is there are a ton of MMOs that are coming out. Their claim makes no sense if you look at the slated releases.
It both wont ever happen, and has already happened.
ET only had the impact it had because the industry was small. Relatively speaking.
Today, production (both indie and AAA tbh) is diverse enough, that no one game could ever taint the whole industry to that extent again.
What we are seeing, instead, is more and more people who resolve “I’m never giving ubisoft/blizzard/EA/a gacha/a mobile game my money again” but still buy and play games. They just start getting more and more invested in what kinds of industry practices they want to discourage/encourage.
As an example, pre-ordering, while still something people do, is now pretty much universally understood to be a bad idea. No Mans Sky and Fallout 76 were such massive phenomenon, merely mentioning one or the other is a complete comeback to anyone trying to tell you pre-ordering something is a good idea.
Sure, NMS became a good game, eventually, but that didn’t retroactively make pre-ordering it a good move when it only became worth buying 12 months after launch.
Another great example, is Suicide Squad. People were interested, right up until it was revealed it was a live service game. Hype fell off a cliff, and nothing WB did could have brough it back. It wasn’t what fans of the Arkham games wanted. People passed it by before it even launched.
…
Concord.
Pre-ordering is dead, live paid alpha testing is booming. There are so many games in development (alpha or beta testing) which can be bought. And as soon as the game is in the ballpark of “finished” it get’s the v1.0 mark. And way before that, there are already DLC’s available for an unfinished game.
I assume you’re referring to stuff like Tarkov or Star Citizen?
These games basically work the same as live service games, except they pretend to be “in development”.
But I’d hardly call it a boom. There’s only a couple truly big money makers, the rest are grifts that don’t really go anywhere, but might have small vocal cult-like fanbases.
Then there are games that really do use the “Early Access” model to fund getting the game made. It’s not really like kickstarter, or preordering, because you do get something in exchange for your money, immediately. And you can look up reviews and videos and see exactly what you are getting. People don’t buy early access games just to wait a couple years to play them. They buy them to play them right now.
And it has brought us games like Satisfactory, DRG, Hades, Subnautica, Everspace…
Even Baldurs Gate 3 was an Early Access title. You could buy and play it for YEARS before “1.0” dropped and became the explosive success it is today.
Those games got made because they were able to sell copies to fund their development throughout the process. And instead of trying to please clueless investors, they had to please the players.
I don’t really see why you’d be salty about this part of the trend. Obviously some stuff is not worth buying, but that’s true whether a game is finished or not.
Concord was the biggest flop of all time and people already forgot about it.
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.
I just remembered about it after watching secret level.
That episode was so cool, I was disappointed to learn it was about a dead game.
I don’t think more expensive games is going to cause a crash. If demand decreases, then the prices will follow.
What could potentially cause a crash (among the big guys) is the massive betting on landing the next big Fortnite goldmine. Sony is investing massively on live service titles like Concord, Marathon and Fairgames. Microsoft has struggled equally. They couldn’t even get Halo right.
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
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.
What I mean is that they are trending towards being a smaller part of the overall market year over year.
Are there any Nintendo titles that cost $80 for the digital release? Digital version of Bananza is $70. I think Nintendo is the only company that’s going to weather upcoming storm just fine since they sell toys and there’s always a demand for those.
ET moment already happened with Concord (scrapped entirely after spending absurd amounts of money) and Veilguard (about to be added to cereal boxes just to recoup some cost).
Yes. Currently announced / released games with $80 price tag for digital:
- Mario Kart World
- Tears of Kingdom - Switch 2 Edition
- Super Mario Party Jamboree - Switch 2 Edition (I think this also has new content)
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land - Switch 2 Edition (also has new content)
Well, that sucks. At least with those you get an option of physical release at the same price. I thought they’d be doing what they did with Banaza which makes sense - those new carts have a non-trivial cost so charging less for digital seemed fair. I was wondering how they got around retailers pushing back against digital being cheaper but I guess they didn’t.
At least with those you get an option of physical release at the same price.
At least in Europe the physical version is more expensive. Mario Kart World for example:
- Digital: 80 €
- Physical: 90 €
It’s happening, but for Hollywood.
But Nintendo’s isn’t anywhere close to having a monopoly on gaming?
Also, I’m totally willing to pay $80 or more for a game I actually want to play. This really is only a problem for the people that need to buy a new game every week.
