kiri2tsubasa said:
Does anyone who post topics like this even understand the causes of the crash? It seems that they do not.
Here were some of the conditions that led to the 83 crash.
1. Atari had a near strangle hold on the entire industry, which at the time was a very niche thing relegated more towards hobbyists.
2. You had the choice of 14+ consoles to choose from.
3. There was a significant lack of publishing control at that time. Any bedroom programmer could put out a game on the systems and because of that games that were simply broken were sold. (No not the popular use of the work broken, but games that were utterly broken such as not being about to start a game at all)
4. Because of their strangle hold when Atari went down just about th entire industry went down with it.
Those are some of the most prominent causes of the 83 crash.
You are aware that multiple reasons can cause a crash, right?
The housing market crash, the dotcom bubble's crash, the Great Depression, the gaming crash of '83 and the tulip mania's crash happened for entirely different reasons.
A market can crash because it is revealed to be entirely fictional, built on hopes and fantasies. It can crash because of a sudden stock market panic. It can crash because one or a handful of lead participants go bankrupt. It can crash because of overconfidence, and assuming infinite growth.
FalloutJack said:
Sorry, but while some big BUSINESSES might crash, the gaming industry is now too powerful to crash itself. It's all very simple, really. If someone falls, even a number of people fall, someone ELSE wins and picks up the slack with the sudden increase in capital.
That sounds like a semantic debate. Yeah of course, the entire concept of selling games won't be eternally destroyed, but then again, neither was it in '83. Activision, EA, and several other companies have survived though that crash. Even Atari itself survived, and only lost dominance.
The dotcom bubble didn't destroy Amazon and eBay either.
Nevertheless, when number of big businesses of a given industry crash at the same time, that's what we call a crash of that industry.
If, say, next year, Microsoft and Ninendo would drop their hardware businesses, and after losing that much of their target platforms, EA and Activision would need to cut 70% of their employees, while Square Enix and Ubisoft an Capcom go bankrupt, that would be commonly called "the video game crash of '14", and not "The Microsoft-Nintendo-EA-Activision-Square-Enix-Ubisoft-Capcom crash".