10 Reasons The Video Game Industry Is Heading For Another Crash

When was the last time you were satisfied with a game on launch day?

By Dan Goad /

The Playstation 4 might have spent 18 months selling like there’s no tomorrow, but thanks to a timely price reduction in the last couple of months, the Xbox One is now starting to catch up. Both have sold far more than their predecessors from last generation had at the same point in their life-cycle, that's for sure.

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It seems crazy then, to suggest that this might change - that gaming is heading for a major problem - but it has happened before, and to horrifying effect. 

In the late 70s and early 80s the saturation of the market - with too many consoles, the rise of home computers as a viable alternative and inferior products - led to the video game crash of 1983. Within two years, gaming revenues dropped from $3.2 billion dollars to just $100 million.

The final blow was the launch of E.T., widely regarded as one of the worst games ever made. It was a game so bad and overproduced that eventually it was buried in the desert like some kind of witchcraft.

With so much positive buzz and the money rolling in, gaming is currently riding the crest of a financial wave just as it was in the 1980s. But game developers are giving consumers fewer and fewer reasons to actually buy anything on launch day - not to mention those who do show faith, end up with genuinely broken and shoddy products as a reward.

In fact, you could say the cracks are already starting to show...

10. History Is Already Repeating Itself

Firstly, there's too much competition within console gaming. At the moment Microsoft and Sony might be dominating, with Nintendo hanging around behind (just as they were in the 1980s, incidentally), but they aren’t the only ones on the market. Steam are launching their own home console-style Steamboxes in the next year, there are hundreds of different Android versions and both Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV are capable of playing games too. They might not be a threat to the big three right now, but it all starts somewhere.

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Competition from outside the console market also didn't help in the 80s. But whereas then, they only had to deal with competition from home computers, now they are facing a challenge from mobile gaming as well. More and more consumers are being pulled towards these other gaming options. 

Steam has already perfected digital gaming, and although Microsoft saw their efforts to move towards a disc-less console fail dramatically at first, you can't deny how a situation where console manufacturers are replaced by a home computer/mobile-market structured framework would become the norm eventually.

It would definitely solve the pre-owned games model that publishers have been working to eradicate for years, anyway. Not only is the situation similar to the 1980s, but we've already seen the first casualties of this structure - say, remember THQ?

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