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When will the next "E.T." moment happen in the industry? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 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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[-] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 days ago

I mean, it's already happening. AAA games are less common, and aren't doing as well as they used to, and the AAA studios are drying up. In its place, we're getting more indie games, more games from small development companies, and they all come at cheaper prices.

Consoles aren't immune to that, they're just delayed in their reaction, because the barrier for entry is higher for indie developers. But the prices that people are willing to pay on PC games isn't going up, because there are plenty of non AAA options available for less, and as that becomes normalised, expensive consoles will falter. Their flagship games will command a premium, but they won't be able to build up the game library they need to stay competitive with the PC market.

And don't forget, Steamdeck and the like are out there now, which directly challenge the niche that the Switch sits in.

I don't think we'll get a "moment", but I think the trend will end in a similar way

[-] slimerancher@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

Just a correction, AAA games aren't less common. We are getting more and more indies, but we are also getting more AAA games than ever. It's possible that percentage of AAA games compared to indie games has changed, but that is because of increased indie output.

Don't have any official stats, but as someone who keeps an eye on upcoming games, there are tons of AAA games coming out pretty much every year.

[-] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago

What I mean is that they are trending towards being a smaller part of the overall market year over year.

this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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