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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
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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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[-] Guadin@k.fe.derate.me 7 points 3 days ago

Pre-ordering is dead, live paid alpha testing is booming. There are so many games in development (alpha or beta testing) which can be bought. And as soon as the game is in the ballpark of "finished" it get's the v1.0 mark. And way before that, there are already DLC's available for an unfinished game.

[-] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I assume you're referring to stuff like Tarkov or Star Citizen?

These games basically work the same as live service games, except they pretend to be "in development".

But I'd hardly call it a boom. There's only a couple truly big money makers, the rest are grifts that don't really go anywhere, but might have small vocal cult-like fanbases.

Then there are games that really do use the "Early Access" model to fund getting the game made. It's not really like kickstarter, or preordering, because you do get something in exchange for your money, immediately. And you can look up reviews and videos and see exactly what you are getting. People don't buy early access games just to wait a couple years to play them. They buy them to play them right now.

And it has brought us games like Satisfactory, DRG, Hades, Subnautica, Everspace...

Even Baldurs Gate 3 was an Early Access title. You could buy and play it for YEARS before "1.0" dropped and became the explosive success it is today.

Those games got made because they were able to sell copies to fund their development throughout the process. And instead of trying to please clueless investors, they had to please the players.

I don't really see why you'd be salty about this part of the trend. Obviously some stuff is not worth buying, but that's true whether a game is finished or not.

this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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