Nintendo ruined gaming-official (so did Apple)

[LordTheNightKnight]

thismeintiel said:

LordTheNightKnight said:

thismeintiel said:

They contributed to it greatly.  Atari's bad decisions about those 2 games cost them millions, probably billions by today's standards, and caused the largest gaming company of the time to go under.  This just left a bad taste in people's mouths about gaming in general.  The oversaturation of consoles (I believe there were around 10 at the time, some by the same company) didn't help this situation, either.  I'm not sayin unlicensed games didn't play a factor, but the largest blow was Atari's poor business decisions.

People stop buying games because they are bad, not because a company loses money (that's confusing cause and effect). And two games would not be enough to make people turn away.

That's true.  However, the two biggest contributors to people shunning gaming as a whole were 2 licensed games, Pac-man and E.T.  Not only were they horrible games, but Atari ordered WAY more to be produced than demand warranted.  With Pac-man they produced 12 million copies and only 7 million were ever sold.  They didn't push it too far with ET, but they still produced 4 million copies and only sold 1.5 million.  Now, I'm not arguing that companies forcing 3rd parties to license games is necessarily a bad thing.  It does allow you to control oversaturation to an extent.  But, don't think that unlicensed game equals bad game.  Tengen, for example, released some really good unlicensed games for the NES.

They could not be the biggest contributors. At most they would cause turning away from the 2600, not all available consoles, and the arcades.