The Great Video Game Crash of 1983: Difference between revisions
Kool-Aid man was a mail-order promo (though later sold in stores), Chase the Chuckwagon was a mail-order promo.
(The libraries were very distinguishable. Q-Bert is an unusual case. Furthermore, that ad includes computers and the 5200, which are not referenced in the paragraph!) |
(Kool-Aid man was a mail-order promo (though later sold in stores), Chase the Chuckwagon was a mail-order promo.) |
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* A glut of companies [[Follow the Leader|attempting to follow in Atari's success]] gave consumers too many choices, which meant no one system could succeed in the long term, since very few consumers would buy more than one. These included (but were not limited to) the Bally Astrocade, the [[Colecovision]], the Coleco Gemini (a 2600 clone), the Emerson Arcadia 2001, the [[Magnavox Odyssey]] [[Odyssey 2]], the Mattel [[Intellivision]], the Vectrex, and the Fairchild Channel F-System II.
* A similar problem occurred with software. Games for these systems were cheap to produce, and since their makers figured [[Shovelware|they'd sell no matter the quality]], [[Sturgeon's Law|poor titles from dozens of hastily-created start-ups flooded the market]]
* As game developers went out of business, retailers were left with unsold product that could not be returned to now-defunct manufacturers. Hoping to salvage ''something'', stores offered massive discounts just to clear inventory. The market for higher-priced new games shrunk in the face of large amounts of budget-priced crud, especially since...
* It was hard for consumers to tell the good games from the bad. The Internet was unavailable to the general public and magazines and books had a long lead time and could only review a few games, so most buyers were left with only the screenshots and text on the back of the box. Since these were almost always [[Covers Always Lie|nonsense designed to get you to buy the game]], consumers were left once-bitten twice-shy.
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