| JGarret said: I´m sure most of you have heard about the famous videogame crash in 1983 (I think that was the year, not sure), and since Nintendo made it relevant again with the NES, the industry has goten so big and profitable, it doesn´t go down even in times of recession....it´d seem this industry wears an undestructible armor, but despite that, what do you think could potentially cause another 'crash'?....One could say "bah, it´s not gonna happen, this industry is getting bigger than all other types of media entertainment"...ok, but there´s always the potential for some kind of threat no one sees coming, and then all of a sudden, it *** up everything.
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One of the things that makes it harder is that the cost to enter the market is much higher. The crash was primarily caused by a few things. Atari failed to deliver new hardware. The Atari 2600 was getting old, and the new one hardly changed anything. Second, there was an oversaturation of the market. There were 12+ consoles, many of which were carbon copies of each other, and tons of software. There were countless companies trying to get a piece of the quickly growing video game market. The only problem was that the things these companies produced was crap. It made today's shovelware look AAA. Quality games were buried beneath a pile of crap. Word of mouth killed sales once people found out most games were crap. These small companies making crap games soon went under, and retailers were left with countless cartridges and they had nothing to do with them. They were thrown in the bargain ben for $5 and people looking for games (mostly as gifts during the holidays) chose them over the quality, normally priced games. Thus, even quality developers faced terrible losses. Almost every gaming-relaed company went out of business, and the only ones that survived were larger ones like Atari who also suffered major loss. With todays market, a random company can't just start making games, and the market is stable enough so that a sudden influx wouldn't affect it as much.
