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[–] eirich 1 point 4 points (+5|-1) ago  (edited ago)

From the way I learned about it, the '83 crash didn't occur from a lack of reviews or something like that, but because too many companies wanted a slice of the pie, and customers just decided not to buy anything.

If you look at game consoles now, people are always talking about the "big three" competing with each other, but they really don't. Not anymore. There's still some multiplatform stuff, but it's mostly about the exclusives.

Instead, imagine if there are actually fifteen companies, and fifteen different game consoles. You've got the PlayStation, Xbox, Wii, but also the MayFaction, ZSphere, Vii, Dreamcast II, Streamfast 7, Lastation, YCube, and so on and so forth.

In this crazy hypothetical world, Ubisoft decides to make fifteen different versions of the next Assassin's Creed for each and every console. Digital Foundry does their usual performance comparison video, but it's more or less impossible to try to compare the graphics of 15 versions of the same game at the game time. So... which version of the game will you buy?

In 1983, the answer was apparently "none". Yes, the games were bad, but that's more a side-effect of trying to put the thing on fifteen platforms, than anything else.

And thus, the crash.