this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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When will the next "E.T." moment happen in the industry? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 days ago by Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/games@sh.itjust.works
36 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Back in the 80's, Atari had a monopoly of games and charged absurd amounts of money for titles that pretty much had no quality control. The cost of each cartridge would easily go over $100 in today's money and gamers began to pull back on purchasing anything. This eventually culminated in the infamous E.T. movie tie in that led to pallets of its unsold cartridges ending up in a landfill and crashing the industry.

Now that Nintendo's signaled to the rest of the industry it's okay to sell digital titles at $80 each, how soon do you see gamers collectively hold back on their purchases that will eventually collapse the AAA market? Will the current trade war play a role in the hardware side of things with the collapse? Will all major companies save Nintendo suffer the downturn?

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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 15 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Well, I'm kinda curious how much longer home consoles are going to hang on.

Nintendo is releasing their second generation handheld. The Steam Deck is quite popular, and the rest of the PC gaming industry has been scrabbling to match it. Meanwhile, the PS5...exists and what's an Xbox even for anymore?

People like to say consoles will continue to exist because they're so much simpler than PCs to "just play" on, but that's not really true anymore. My parents' Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing. We're in a different world than when I was a kid, when I could really get a game, plug it in the SNES, flip the switch and it runs.

I could see Microsoft and Sony having an Atari or Sega moment. Exiting the hardware market, shutting down their platform, becoming a relatively minor game studio occasionally remembering to make a game in a property they haven't published in awhile, like Atari putting out an Alone In The Dark game every 1.5 decades or so.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I do miss the era when you just put the thing in the thing-shaped socket and the thing just worked.

Now you cannot do anything without setting accounts, downloading things, updating things and accepting tons of unread documents.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Increasingly, the software published on disc or cartridge is incomplete or unfinished, because there is pressure from management to ship retail products on time, but game development is hard, so the dev team will use the time during manufacturing and distribution of discs or cartridges to write patches, which will be automatically downloaded when the game runs. And it's getting to the point that the cartridge or disc just functions as a license key. Maybe some of the game's assets will be stored there but not the complete game, as they'll still require large downloads to function.

I've been a Nintendo + PC gamer my entire life; basically anything I've ever wanted to play was available with that combo...and I'm ditching Nintendo.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

what’s an Xbox even for anymore?

PC-ifying the console market, same as always. A task it has almost completed.

Sony exiting the console market would be failure. They've been using the PS1 playbook five times in a row - seven or eight if you count handhelds - and it's worked, at most, thrice. Sony's ideal market has games developed for a specific platform, and occasionally ported outside it, so each vibrant fiefdom has its own identity and culture. That made them a mountain of cash on PS1 and PS2 and then nearly killed the PS3.

Developers' ideal market is making the game once and selling it to all customers. Platforms are an obstacle. Sony's ideal was fucked as soon as RenderWare looked the same on any console or PC. Microsoft got the message and made the 360 a generic compiler target. Sony almost shipped the PS3 without a real GPU. It took them years to stop fucking around and offer libraries to make their tiny special supercomputer act like any other computer - and that got them better ports, and made them more money.

What followed was two and a half generations of lockstep releases for near-identical AMD laptops. You can buy the blue one or the green one. Yet I don't think Sony really internalized what's happened until the Helldivers situation. They suddenly demanded every PC player get in their console ecosystem, because they recognized how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them.

Microsoft exiting the console market would be... what they've been planning for a decade, probably. Somewhere after the Xbox One, I mused that they could upset the console race by not releasing an Xbox Two, and just treat the upcoming PS5 as a slightly broken PC. They seem to be getting around to it. Albeit with a side of releasing a Steam Deck competitor, because they love showing up late to a trend.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

I propose we call Microsoft's portable Xbox a "Xune."

[–] AAA@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago

My parents' Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing.

Two-fold problem: a) give the consumer freedom of choice b) make it difficult enough to successfully set it up once, and then stay locked in

That's both by accident (provide freedom choice) and by design (lock them as long as possibile).