That's barely survived lol, like what happened with  Sega ( or i say Sega is still more productive then Atari honestly ). 

But what happen was  lack of competition at that time, over monopoly from their part, and lack innovation and leading to their own downfall.

They still survived :P 

Didn't the entire industry collapse because:

-Crap 3rd party games 

- ^went into full effect after there were overhyped,overproduced, underdeveloped and crap 1st party games (ET,Pacman)

-Competition from PCs

-Once people understood that they were buying crap they stopped buying it. And then the Domino effect started.

Or something like that...

`

Probably not... The industry as a whole went to shit and Atari was the nail in the coffen

Yup agree with what you said there, most of the reason you write is actually true, and even if they want, other company already had a plan to take their positions, maybe we could say Nintendo can even exist even without the downfall of  Atari, or even Sega or Sony or the closest one Microsoft and Apple

Just think that technology bring more  inovations and competion, and market and demand keep growing and growing, i guess that's the law of the nature in economy.

I'm actually glad that they didn't prevented it! Not that they were able to do that..

In the case of Nintendo and Sega; they were already in the game business and in fact Nintendo tired to bring the NES to America through Atari but, they couldn't come to a agreement.  As for Sony and Mircosoft cannot say for sure.

Atari is not Atari anymore though, the company is Atari in name only. They own the rights to some of those old titles still though I think, for whatever good that'll do. What use does one still have for a name like Missile Command? They're way, way further gone than SEGA.

Anyway I think what you said is right, they should've put the leash on third parties. They should have made rules, and they should have monitored, overlooked and organised what was released on the system. Basically, they should have done what Nintendo after the crash (as one of the handful of survivors) realized they should be doing even if in hindsight that's ironically what's biting Nintendo in the behind these past few generations.

There's no way Atari could have known though, and in an industry that young it was bound to be just one big experiment. Of course it also wasn't completely their fault. I agree it was a very good system and I can have great fun with some of the games on my Atari.

I think we can only take the hard lessons that Atari taught us and move forward (btw, I believe they are a great company and earned their place in history). It is easy to reflect back using the information we have now and say it could have been preventable, but that is hindsight bias. They did not have the knowledge that we do today and even if they did, it might have been contradictory to the mindset of the industry back then the point where they could not change it (Atari could not go to third-parties and force to pump out quality software; and they could not pull a mid-1980s Nintendo policy prior to the crash because developers had belief that the industry was growing with the existing industry model and so they would have merely switched to another platform who would not restrict them). I believe that the crash had just as much to do with the rest of the members of the industry back then as it did with Atari.

Why? What do you think would've happened?

The answer is yes. Atari could have controlled its own destiny.

1. Atari 2600 needed to have built-in measures to prevent unauthorized games from being developed.
2. Atari needed to have quality control for all games released on the system.
3. Atari needed to make the 5200 exceptionally better. It needed to be $120 cheaper and have a better and more practical controller.

There would have been no crash and Atari would have released the 7800 around the same time Nintendo would release the NES.