Why do people predict another gaming crash like the early 80s?

[Agent Abe Caprine]

People have been begging for and predicting a crash for nearly 10 years. Probably longer. The crash of 83 wasn't even industry wide or worldwide. It mostly hit the console market in the US.

 

[Cool kitties club]

IIRC the 7800 was actually held up due to typical Atari/Commodore company shuffling bullshit happening at the worst possible time.

Damn I got blown the fuck out. I know there was something up with the Lynx. It was shopped around as a prototype for a while before it was released making even more impressive when you consider how old it actually was.

If you didn't have Nintendo step in all that would have happened was that someone else would have.

I have no doubt about that, but it is an objective fact that there was a market crash which Nintendo tailored their NES roll out too (the advanced video system was never released due to similarities to the failed coleco adam expansion). The consumer may have not really noticed the crash as on the consumer side it meant pretty cheap prices for games.

 

[Coolio55]

You tickled my trap card! RenderWare wasn't an engine, it was middleware that dealt with rendering and things associated with it. And maybe Renderware sputtered out and died with Criterion.

I reflect. Renderware was sometimes used as just a graphics engine (and started out as one) but it also had support for sound, collision, Havok physics, AI and time slicing.
By "Killed", I mean that EA bought criterion and sat on it despite a version for the new platforms being teased before the buyout.

 

[Pissmaster]

I've heard about the ever-looming second video game crash for literal decades by now. I'm sure some people somewhere were talking about the music industry crashing in the 70s after the Beatles broke up, disco took over, and vinyl records were starting to be phased out in favor of compact cassettes. Even the advent of the internet forcing the entire global record industry to completely restructure how music is monetized due to the entire echelon becoming unstoppably free didn't crash the industry, despite it changing forever. A second gaming crash won't happen.

But what is looming on the horizon are the problems with subscription services, and how they're all one-size-fits-all platforms that seek to centralize as much as possible. When you pay a flat fee for something like Gamepass, there's no more voting with your wallet. You're going to keep paying your $15 a month no matter what they throw up on there, as long as you have a few games you want to play to keep you placated. This removes incentive to create something truly great, as subscribers will be subsidizing everything on the platform. Why bother with developing the next Fallout New Vegas, when you can save so much more money just farting out some garbage-ass propaganda game your investors will pay you and your team of pajeets to make in Unity? Same reason why there's not much of a drive to make great music when you can put out zero-effort tripe, bot the hell out of it, and get paid on Spotify:

And you damn well know these services will be popular as fuck, and truly unstoppable once they start getting CoD and FIFA. Hope you like subsidizing countless walking simulators about fighting White Supremacy™.

 

[Bussy Catalog]

I've heard about the ever-looming second video game crash for literal decades by now. I'm sure some people somewhere were talking about the music industry crashing in the 70s after the Beatles broke up, disco took over, and vinyl records were starting to be phased out in favor of compact cassettes. Even the advent of the internet forcing the entire global record industry to completely restructure how music is monetized due to the entire echelon becoming unstoppably free didn't crash the industry, despite it changing forever. A second gaming crash won't happen.

But what is looming on the horizon are the problems with subscription services, and how they're all one-size-fits-all platforms that seek to centralize as much as possible. When you pay a flat fee for something like Gamepass, there's no more voting with your wallet. You're going to keep paying your $15 a month no matter what they throw up on there, as long as you have a few games you want to play to keep you placated. This removes incentive to create something truly great, as subscribers will be subsidizing everything on the platform. Why bother with developing the next Fallout New Vegas, when you can save so much more money just farting out some garbage-ass propaganda game your investors will pay you and your team of pajeets to make in Unity? Same reason why there's not much of a drive to make great music when you can put out zero-effort tripe, bot the hell out of it, and get paid on Spotify:

And you damn well know these services will be popular as fuck, and truly unstoppable once they start getting CoD and FIFA. Hope you like subsidizing countless walking simulators about fighting White Supremacy™.

If there is ever another video game crash, it's not going to be caused by the same factors as before and it's certainly not going to look the same. It'll be a result of subscription services flooding peoples' devices with terrible, low-effort content that nobody wants to pay for and the actually good stuff being all exclusive to different services. There's a limit to how many bills people are willing to pay every month, and when you end up paying $15/month to a dozen different services that each only have a few things you want you'll start to wonder if it's really worth it.

I see loads of people singing the praises of Game Pass because it has so much quality content right now, but once Sony launches their equivalent and other major players start to follow suit that quality is going to be spread much, much thinner. Just like how Netflix used to have a gold mine of classics and now it's been chiseled away by all of the other big media corps so much that all they have going for them these days is some very uneven original shows.

 

[BlazikenLover]

5 years? Try the 7 years. Think you can trace it back to /v/ seeing a few blunders/disappointments (ToRtanic, duke nukem forever, mass effect 3) and screaming about how that was a sign of the imminent crash.
It is mostly parroted by people who are (rightfully) upset about the current state of gaming, who believe a crash will make all the normies and greedy publishers go away and then only truly passionate people will make games. I believe that there is a surge of such people after an overhyped game fails to deliver (cyberpunk comes to mind).

Personally I do not give a shit anymore, a decade ago it was day 1 dlcs and preorder bonuses "ruining gaming", then it was lootboxes, then wokeshit. My solution is not playing AAA yearly releases and staying away of big hyped up releases.
As nostalgic as I may be about some multiplayer games in the late 2000s and early 2010's I would not go back, since there were so many positives in the past 6 or so years:
As criticized as valve was for how they treated beloved ips (half life, left 4 dead), their lack of communication and their awful card game, they continue to provide quality of life features with steam:
-they worked with playstation and nintendo to bring native support of game controllers.
You may think it is a small feature but I thank gaben for not having to fiddle with drivers and software to get my playstation controllers to work on pc
-proton: I don't use linux for gaming but it is nice to see they haven't given up on it after they hyped up steam for linux all those years back and nothing came out of it since devs/publishers dont wanna bother porting or do such a shitty job
-regional pricing
-the workshop so I don't have to be uncompressing files and move them to the folder or fiddle with modloaders

As for more general things:
-Japanese games being ported to pc
And not just mediocre and unoptimized ports, actual decent or great ports
If you came to me in 2013 and told me dangan ronpa or yakuza (very japanese games) or the newer digimon games would eventually get ported to pc I would have called you crazy. Hell back then I also thought something as big as FF or DQ would never see pc ports of their newest mainline entries.

-game development becoming easier and the abundance of indie games
Yeah yeah I know lots of them are trash or "pixel shit" but some multiplayer games I have sunk dozen or thousand of hours in the past six years have been indies. Back in 2010 someone said indie and mostly 2d platform/puzzle games (braid, super meat boy) came to mind, minecraft was the big exception back then.
You do not need to be a programming genius, a 3d artist and animator to make an ok 3d game, someone passionate enough can grab unity and a few assets and make an interesting game (phasmophobia comes to mind)

 

[seri0us]

Tetris is the best game of all time, I play it almost everyday.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Because it’s all variations of battle royals mode now

A Battle Royal of Battle Royals and none of them come with cheese.

 

[WhoBusTank69]

Sony is downgrading current releases to run on the PS4 as well as making PC ports because nobody has a PS5. BF2042, for example, requires a top-of-the-line PC build to function just passably. A material/supply shortage is what could make another crash feasible - require new hardware and your market lessens.
People see copies upon copies of your game on the shelf or a lack of reviews because nobody can play them? They'll misconstrue it as a poor game and not buy it. Atari thought this was why they failed/caused the crash in the first place, hence them burying surplus ET cartridges in the desert, but it was more a case of overestimating their consumerbase.
If AAA games try to downscale production value to stay in the current/past generation of graphical requirements, they lose out on licensing deals and promotions on top of competing with a flourishing market ruled by indie studios.

If you want a crash, the scalpers and cryptominers will cause it for you. Push demand for the newest consoles, graphics cards, and CPUs; this will hurt it more than any bad press or allegations could dream of.

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

In this day and age, asking for another videogame crash is the goddamn equivalent of a monkey's paw wish, at least that's how i see it.

Lets say for a moment people get their wish, and another videogame crash happens in the near future, EA, Activision, Ubisoft and all those shitty companies go bankrupt, pretty much the AAA industry disappears overnight. And then what? Indies take over? do people really want that? whatever is left of the videogame industry will be way worse than it is now, where most RPGs are Undertale/Earthbound clones, most horror games are FNAF clones, platformers and adventure games devolve into woke visual novels, and countless genres like fighting games would flat out disappear, it would be either that indie shit or Chinese gacha games.

 

[Mike Stoklasa]

Because excepting Nintendo, the largest and most prodictive development houses are creatively bankrupt.

But the industry is so big now there is always a new crop of kids to spend their parents' money on new shit. Crash unlikely. But lifelong customers will be more rare.

 

[Marissa Moira]

In this day and age, asking for another videogame crash is the goddamn equivalent of a monkey's paw wish, at least that's how i see it.

Lets say for a moment people get their wish, and another videogame crash happens in the near future, EA, Activision, Ubisoft and all those shitty companies go bankrupt, pretty much the AAA industry disappears overnight. And then what? Indies take over? do people really want that? whatever is left of the videogame industry will be way worse than it is now, where most RPGs are Undertale/Earthbound clones, most horror games are FNAF clones, platformers and adventure games devolve into woke visual novels, and countless genres like fighting games would flat out disappear, it would be either that indie shit or Chinese gacha games.

It's literally the same shit when people say we need to depopulate the earth in order to save the environment. Every scenario poised by these people come with their personal exceptions and favorites winning out. Essentially everyone who is not them lose big time and they don't.

They're not accounting for the fact that a company going bankrupt doesn't just vanish into thin air, their IPs get bought up by other companies who would then want to make more games because there would be sufficient demand and an audience who's available.

 

[ZMOT]

If there is ever another video game crash, it's not going to be caused by the same factors as before and it's certainly not going to look the same. It'll be a result of subscription services flooding peoples' devices with terrible, low-effort content that nobody wants to pay for and the actually good stuff being all exclusive to different services. There's a limit to how many bills people are willing to pay every month, and when you end up paying $15/month to a dozen different services that each only have a few things you want you'll start to wonder if it's really worth it.

I see loads of people singing the praises of Game Pass because it has so much quality content right now, but once Sony launches their equivalent and other major players start to follow suit that quality is going to be spread much, much thinner. Just like how Netflix used to have a gold mine of classics and now it's been chiseled away by all of the other big media corps so much that all they have going for them these days is some very uneven original shows.

this. the greed of cutting out the middleman and make a bigger cut yourself will always lead to competition (unless we're getting to a point where everything is owned by one entity, but then the market is fucked anyway).

another thing people forget with MUH GAMEPASS MUH GATCHA - who's gonna pay for it? with what money? right now it's a race who crashes first, the west or china, but either way it will take a lot of money and companies with it. can't fleece whales if there aren't any and the few there are rather spend it on something else. same way joe casual won't pay for 5+ subscriptions at the best of times, if shit gets (more) scarce that money either goes somewhere else or outright evaporates. even the most retarded consoomer will stop buying useless shit if he's literally starving.
outside of that is just the usual cycle of consolidation, saturation and stagnation which is always sucky. honestly I pity the zoomer´s who never got to experience the booming age of videogames in the 90s/00s.

In this day and age, asking for another videogame crash is the goddamn equivalent of a monkey's paw wish, at least that's how i see it.

Lets say for a moment people get their wish, and another videogame crash happens in the near future, EA, Activision, Ubisoft and all those shitty companies go bankrupt, pretty much the AAA industry disappears overnight. And then what? Indies take over? do people really want that? whatever is left of the videogame industry will be way worse than it is now, where most RPGs are Undertale/Earthbound clones, most horror games are FNAF clones, platformers and adventure games devolve into woke visual novels, and countless genres like fighting games would flat out disappear, it would be either that indie shit or Chinese gacha games.

considering I had more fun with indies than AAA the last few years, I don't see an issue with that.

you're also assuming no one is gonna step in to fill that void, ignoring that nature abhors a vacuum. if there are people willing to spend dosh on something, someone will come in and fill that demand. the only difference will be it will be more catered to that playerbase out of necessity compared to now where it's just a (bi-)yearly product. it's the same reason we'll never get a hard crash because they're too many retards making that feasible (unless the outside factors change alongside it).

 

[Billy Beer]

The video game crash will happen when the tech bubble/SM bubble bursts.

A reset/adjustment, should have happened over a decade ago. However, thanks to a newly gained audience of 'gamer girl' and 'granny gamer', largely thanks to the push of Microsoft and Nintendo (wii) respectively, it has kicked the crash-can down the road.

Then when those audiences started to collapse, the industry re-adjusted their audience to capture the new-phenomenom of mobile gaming, which is why so many indies are knocking about; cost-effective to make, can be played on multiple platforms and MTX allow for maximum returns. Can succesfully kicked again.

Covid and the lockdowns have been a god-send for the industry, as MTX fatigue was starting to set-in around 2019, especially with the lawsuits going off over FIFA's gambling practices. That's all been forgotten now because people are too scared to go outside. Can kicked in to the long grass.

However, the industry is now built upon superficial and fickle fans, with the vast majority of income coming from MTX, digital downloads and mobile gaming. Many people won't accept it, but the industry has one-foot in the grave. With Nintendo going all-out mobile, Microsoft making a complete cluster-fuck of their launch (again), Sony struggling through their own success - they can't make enough consoles and PC becoming too expensive and cumbersome to bother with the industry is only being propped up by predatory practices and mobile gaming.

Clever companies are trying to diversify in to new tech, namely VR, which will be the safety net that catches some of the industry when it collapses and others are going balls-to-the-wall accelerationism, like Microsoft's gamepass. FWIW i have and enjoy gamepass, but it is accelerating the collapse.

TL;DR - the industry has weaseled out of collapsing for more than a decade, but it is inevitable that it will collapse, unless it can find a cheaper and more widespread technology than mobile gaming. Which it can't. Streaming consoles, streaming services and GAAS are the last ditch attempts at sucking all the life out of the industry before it dies.

TL;DR, TL;DR - The crash is right around the corner, and has been for a decade.

 

[iceteayo]

In this day and age, asking for another videogame crash is the goddamn equivalent of a monkey's paw wish, at least that's how i see it.

Lets say for a moment people get their wish, and another videogame crash happens in the near future, EA, Activision, Ubisoft and all those shitty companies go bankrupt, pretty much the AAA industry disappears overnight. And then what? Indies take over? do people really want that? whatever is left of the videogame industry will be way worse than it is now, where most RPGs are Undertale/Earthbound clones, most horror games are FNAF clones, platformers and adventure games devolve into woke visual novels, and countless genres like fighting games would flat out disappear, it would be either that indie shit or Chinese gacha games.

And then shooters are just random milsims I have rarely ever seen CODlike indie shooters recently.

Seriously indie games are good but people overrate most of them. Hell and only few indies ever get into what I call the “circlejerk praise” where you can’t go 2 steps without seeing an inside joke connected to said game or constant praise.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Not much to add, but I want to tell you guys the responses here make me happy. I've been saying this stuff for years (That gaming has been in decline since the late days of the Xbox 360, that the crash of 83 is overblown) and for years I've been derided for it. It's almost a decade later, but it's good to see others coming around to my position.

 

[Leaf Wage Slave]

I mean, I think we need something like the crash again, but at this point it's mostly a joke - the industry as is makes far too much money for that to realistically happen, at least in my lifetime. Hell, doesn't Nintendo basically have enough money to survive for a century if they stopped making anything new, or is that old news?

That said -

The video game crash will happen when the tech bubble/SM bubble bursts.

A reset/adjustment, should have happened over a decade ago. However, thanks to a newly gained audience of 'gamer girl' and 'granny gamer', largely thanks to the push of Microsoft and Nintendo (wii) respectively, it has kicked the crash-can down the road.

Then when those audiences started to collapse, the industry re-adjusted their audience to capture the new-phenomenom of mobile gaming, which is why so many indies are knocking about; cost-effective to make, can be played on multiple platforms and MTX allow for maximum returns. Can succesfully kicked again.

Covid and the lockdowns have been a god-send for the industry, as MTX fatigue was starting to set-in around 2019, especially with the lawsuits going off over FIFA's gambling practices. That's all been forgotten now because people are too scared to go outside. Can kicked in to the long grass.

However, the industry is now built upon superficial and fickle fans, with the vast majority of income coming from MTX, digital downloads and mobile gaming. Many people won't accept it, but the industry has one-foot in the grave. With Nintendo going all-out mobile, Microsoft making a complete cluster-fuck of their launch (again), Sony struggling through their own success - they can't make enough consoles and PC becoming too expensive and cumbersome to bother with the industry is only being propped up by predatory practices and mobile gaming.

Clever companies are trying to diversify in to new tech, namely VR, which will be the safety net that catches some of the industry when it collapses and others are going balls-to-the-wall accelerationism, like Microsoft's gamepass. FWIW i have and enjoy gamepass, but it is accelerating the collapse.

TL;DR - the industry has weaseled out of collapsing for more than a decade, but it is inevitable that it will collapse, unless it can find a cheaper and more widespread technology than mobile gaming. Which it can't. Streaming consoles, streaming services and GAAS are the last ditch attempts at sucking all the life out of the industry before it dies.

TL;DR, TL;DR - The crash is right around the corner, and has been for a decade.

- the current state of the industry is, IMO, a castle built on sand. At some point, they won't be able to kick that proverbial can any further down the road, and something will have to give. Do I know what it is, no, and anyone who thinks they do is probably a bullshit artist.

Least if the industry does collapse it might finally kill off Jim Sterling's "career"...

 

[Marissa Moira]

Least if the industry does collapse it might finally kill off Jim Sterling's "career"...

>killing an industry to own a fat man in a wig
That's a bit much. Especially since what's in decline varies by genre. First Person shooters you could argue they're in stagnation, 3d platformers are a rare sight to how many were once made. Most of the other genres are fine.

 

[Leaf Wage Slave]

>killing an industry to own a fat man in a wig
That's a bit much. Especially since what's in decline varies by genre. First Person shooters you could argue they're in stagnation, 3d platformers are a rare sight to how many were once made. Most of the other genres are fine.

Honestly that one’s more of a benefit by proxy - haven’t watched one of Sterlings videos in god knows how long, from poking into his thread it sounds like I haven’t missed much.

That aside, yeah - video games themselves are in a fairly alright place. The industry itself might be fucked in the future - imo, once every company gets their own streaming platform we’re probably gonna speedrun to Blood from a Stone levels of trying to get Joe Blow to spend on all these different services. Until that happens, any talk of a crash is either a joke or a nothingburger

 

[Marissa Moira]

Honestly that one’s more of a benefit by proxy - haven’t watched one of Sterlings videos in god knows how long, from poking into his thread it sounds like I haven’t missed much.

That aside, yeah - video games themselves are in a fairly alright place. The industry itself might be fucked in the future - imo, once every company gets their own streaming platform we’re probably gonna speedrun to Blood from a Stone

Streaming games is a whole different can of worms comparing to streaming movies, games have much bigger file sizes and constantly need to load and reload stuff. Most of America would not be able to handle it even 10 years from now. You have downloads like Xbox allows but even then Gamepass may wind up like netflix where it's stripped away and people go back to hoarding physical media.