Are we heading to another gaming crash like in 1983?

With the rise of corporations ravaging our games with DLC, shovelware, and broken games day one, do you feel like this trend will act like a catalyst to a "Crash" in the gaming market? It seems like a lot of people I know are getting burnt out by this current gaming trend. How do you think these trends will play out in the future? Do you think gamers are on the verge of "giving up" on these companies and stopping the purchase of their games?

No its not in the same state as 1983 and it doesn't look like it will be either

No I don't think we'll ever see a gaming crash like before. Gaming is much more entrenched in the mainstream now for that to happen.

What on earth would even make you consider something like that? but no we are not heading towards anything of the sort.

83 was and will be in the past and was in the early years of gaming and nothing even considered that we will ever see something like that again, its like saying that gamers will stop playing games and gaming will die as a entertainment source, and do you really think that will happen.

Gaming is too spread out across different platforms and audiences to collapse like it did back then.

I mean...Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo could disappear tomorrow, and there would still be many millions of gamers spending billions of dollars on the industry.

No. The landscape now is vastly different than 1983. We actually have publishers who (mostly) know what they're doing, only 4 major players in the game hardware business (if you count PC as one system), and fewer high profile failures to kill gaming stock.

The world is completely different from 1983.

• There aren't new consoles releasing everyday; there are three main consoles each of which has an ~5-8 year life cycle.
• Most games are available for multiple platforms, so you developers can reach the widest audience.
• Birck-and-mortar stores and shelf space no longer play a pivotal role in the industry. Because the industry is no longer constrained by physical stores, a flood in the market doesn't result in stores returning stock.
• Self-Publishing is easier than ever.

I'm not sure how long 4,000 person development teams can last in the AAA landscape. If there is a crash, then it won't be similar or for the reasons of the 1983 crash. It's not a market flood that will cause another crash, but a technology flood, causing a need for increase number of people, an inability to playtest, and exorbitant budgets on projects. But even if this crash still occurs there will still people developers making games, so it's not going to be remotely the same as 1983.

Remembering as a kid in 1983 onward, I actually didn't know then that there was a video game crash. During that time period, I remember seeing lots of ads for 5200 games..etc and later for 7800 which it's backwards compatibility option was pretty cool feature, plenty of arcade cabs in various stores...most every store had at least one and from my viewpoint all seemed fine. I remember in 84 Atari re-releasing the 2600 called the jr. 2600 and the commerical played on TV constantly that year.Atari commercial

Sorry but 2 bad games for the 2600, ET and Pacman did not make up the video game crash nor did anyone ignore playing them. For adults in the years before, Video games were a novelty and nothing more. A fad if you will. For the youngest kids, even bad games were entertaining for a while. For teens it was a social thing, usually at the arcades when they weren't chasing girls. So the fad wore off as retailers overstocked and Warner over projected earnings as Wall Street grew to expect that forecast to come true.

No doubt financially for a few companies, the crash during those 2 years was destructive and no doubt the older crowd stopped purchasing new copies as second hand sales at flea markets were in abundance but honestly for consumers I don't think it was as bad as people make it out to be today. People didn't consume the consoles and games from retail as much cause it was a fad and too many sucky games but all the kids played games and the older teens filled the arcades, other than the fact that there were a lot of poor quality console titles out there but there certainly was no shortage of them nor kids willing to play them..since few adults did much of that back then after the novelty wore off.

Today there are too much negative talk and complaints about the gaming industry but it's as strong as ever if not more.

Hardly. Even if Sony and MS co under, Nintendo will keep on chugging.

If all 3 go under, the industry will keep on chugging.

Also if any of the big 3 is going under , it will be Nintendo long before Sony or Microsoft.

But none of the big 3 will go under in the near foreseeable future.

Sony's kind of in a perpetual crisis...

The difference between today and 1983 is people are spending money on gaming regardless of the mistakes the industry makes. AC Unity and Halo MCC are broken messes that sell like crazy. Gaming as a whole has become too big to fail. We will lose a few studios along the way but year after year, sales records will be broken.

Yes some of Sony´s divisions has bad red numbers but thats just part of Sony. Sony has games, music, movies, tv, mobiles, financial and a few other divisions.

@revolution2k6: Its the gamers who fuel this overpriced DLC and broken games issues.

Remember back in the day, game had to be as polished as much as possible and ready to go, the games were packed with all the content from the go with occasional expansion pack for some games, which were what DLC is supposed to be.

I for one dont buy DLC, i made a mistake buying Dirt 3, some 80 dollars for half a game, all the DLC that would be in the full game back in the day. The other half was DLC that works out more than retail game itself.

Now i bought TLOU on PS4 and DLC was included. After playing DLC i was referring to it as expansion pack because i thought that price they were asking justified by amount of content it contained.

There is some good DLC here and there content vs. price wise, but 90 percent is nothing.

Easiest way to see if DLC was supposed to be in the main game is, you compare games content wise since launch of PS3/360 to that of game era of previous gen times taking into consideration hardware limitations.