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?

  • AAA@feddit.org
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    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).