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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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[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Increasingly, the software published on disc or cartridge is incomplete or unfinished, because there is pressure from management to ship retail products on time, but game development is hard, so the dev team will use the time during manufacturing and distribution of discs or cartridges to write patches, which will be automatically downloaded when the game runs. And it's getting to the point that the cartridge or disc just functions as a license key. Maybe some of the game's assets will be stored there but not the complete game, as they'll still require large downloads to function.

I've been a Nintendo + PC gamer my entire life; basically anything I've ever wanted to play was available with that combo...and I'm ditching Nintendo.

this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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