| Sentient_Nebula said: 1983: The market was bigger than it had ever been The fledgling video game market was exploding at the time, with an annual revenue of over $3 billion (Over $7 billion when adjusted for inflation). While not directly the cause of the crash, this did cause some other factors, which shall be explained later. 2015 equivalent The PS4 is breaking sales records, and in the US/UK, the Xbox One is also doing very well. The 3DS is a strong performer, despite stiff competition from mobile games. The market is doing quite well, indeed! However, many people are using this fact as an excuse to say it won't crash. Just remember, bubbles always grow before they burst, as what happened in 1983. 1983: Over-saturation of the market As a direct result of this massive growth, many companies were trying to cash in on this new market. Unfortunately, many of these games from inexperienced companies were quite bad, even for their day. The problem was that pretty much anyone could make a game, or even a whole console, and start selling it for a profit. With little-to-no quality control, this flood of bad games and bad consoles led to a drop in consumer trust. 2015 equivalent We're starting to see something similar to this flood of games from 1983. Now that Sony, Microsoft, Steam, and many other platforms allow self-publishing, this means that pretty much anyone can make and sell games, often with almost no quality control (Looking at you, Steam!). While we have reviews to seperate the good and the bad, the large number of poorly reviewed indies means that many people simply don't trust indie devs to make good games. (This is also a likely reason as to way many people dislike indies these days).
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You are wrong here. Over the last generation we saw massive consolidation of 3rd party publishers. Kin to what happened in the movie industry with only 3-4 massive studios existing after the consolidation. All through ast gen we saw consolidation of major publishers as well as the death of several smaller ones (sierra, Atlus, Majesco, THQ, etc etc). We also saw the consolidation of many smaller devs/publishers into larger publishers.
People also aren't buying those indie games. They remain low on the sales chart. While popular good indie games usually get the attention they need. I doubt there are that many people that bought Bad Rats and then chose not to buy Braid. And if they were to lose faith in indie developers they would just put more money into bigger games... Which would just help the industry anyways
