User blog comment:Damac1214/Black Ops II Patch Notes + Micro-Transactions on the Way/@comment-3171236-20130312190802/@comment-3171236-20130314000250

No, the cause of the crash wasn't centered around one publisher/console. It was focused on all 12 consoles that were available at the time.

Every single one of these consoles had their own library, most of them filled with third-party titles. Activision split from Atari in 1979 because Warner Communications (who owned Atari at that time) refused to credit the developers in the same way they credited people who made their songs and movies. Atari tried to sue Activision to prevent Activision from selling its games, but Activision won the case.

Because of the outcome of this lawsuit, developers were legally entitled to sell games without the console maker's approval, leading to a massive influx of what we call today shovelware. Most of this shovelware was extremely low quality, and advertised heavily, but the huge amount of these games caused consumer faith in the quality of them to reduce to little.

What does this have to do with our current market? As the publishers and developers target the casual audience (and an ever-growing reliance by consumers of sites such as Metacritic), high-profile games are one-by-one deflating. Take Medal of Honor: Warfighter for example. Heavily Advertised game. Commercials, TV Spots, Website banners, feature articles, maximum overhype. And look what happened to it. It bombed. EA even expected it to sell more than it did, and be overall more successful, even though it was a glitchy, generic mess.

Now flash back to Atari, 1983. It's December, and they produce millions upon millions of copies of ET, which they expect to do marvelous. It completely fucking explodes in their face, selling far less than they estimated, and being panned commercially and critically at the same time.

Seeing any trends?