Did platform fragmentation hurt classic gaming?

[Flojomojo]

So I just learned that Coleco was all set to make home versions of Phoenix and Vanguard until Atari came in and scooped them. The same thing happened with Parker Brothers and Popeye.

Having lots of 3rd party developers certainly helped the Atari 2600 gain dominance, because it had so much choice. But did the competition among different platforms (Atari, Mattel, Coleco, Philips) hurt or help the industry as a whole? Could a monopoly/standard have delayed or prevented the crash? Or would a single development house not have the resources to make all the arcade ports that drove a large amount of demand in those days?

[Spriggy]

Interesting.  The rivalry between the systems, from the gamer's side of things, was great imo.    I was (and still am obviously) a 2600 follower and boasted about the range of games, however my friend would say the Colecovision may not have had as large a title base, but argued the graphics were better ... using Donkey Kong as an example.  Normal human behavior.  "Mine is better than yours because ...."

As for the ruthless rivalry between the system houses, did the rivalry create better games and accessories .. one house trying to outdo the other .... and hence fuel the gamer's to purchase more, creating more profit?

I don't know. 😶

[godslabrat]

Personally, and I realize this is a minority opinion, I think the industry suffers when there are three systems, as opposed to two.  The classic era is one example, the PS2 era is another.  

[John Stamos Mullet]

I think the bigger thing that kills it is sticker shock. When Atari was competing with Coleco and Mattel and all their top systems were $150 and each game was $30-$50 in 1984 money. These things are expensive and having to choose based on game availability doesn't help.

[mr_me]

I don't consider intellivision to be a real competitor with colecovision.  In 1980-82 the choice was between the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, I barely new the Odyssey2 existed.  By 1983 the Atari 2600 and Intellivision became legacy discounted systems while colecovision competed with the atari 5200.

 

I don't think software was the problem.  Atari made excellent cartridges for competing systems as did Mattel.  The problem was mismanagement; Atari was a mess; Mattel and Coleco wasted resources fumbling into the home computer market.

Edited July 26, 2019 by mr_me

[Tanooki]

3 hours ago, godslabrat said:

Personally, and I realize this is a minority opinion, I think the industry suffers when there are three systems, as opposed to two.  The classic era is one example, the PS2 era is another.  

I think you're onto it going off the concept set up in this thread.  The old three's a crowd concept seems to be fairly true both with the 80s and 90s into through today really.  In the 80s pre-NES you had the dominant player and someone else got a decent secondary chunk to a point, and the rest were rabble that fell off and it did cause a fragmenting where most would get by fear or by threat of the company by some means making games for just one device.  Atari did it, Nintendo (NES), and Sony.  The best times that worked for gamers on two samey enough systems were when you had just 2 truly strong players in the pond.  Nintendo and Sega were it for a good long stretch both on the console and handheld front too (SNES/Genesis, GB/GameGear.)  Mind you I am speaking US/NA market, not globally.

 

You run into the later 90s you had the PS1 and the N64, the Saturn got the bread crumbs and then tanked.  Rolling into the 00s you had Nintendo, Sony, and MS, and well despite the capable hardware other than the overly small discs and we saw how 3 systems couldn't work well together.  Nintendo learned a poor but one time profitable lesson with the Wii that you can't compete in a three way, so they went low def waggle for the masses and made bank.  Sony and MS fought it out and well that was an interesting setup.  Nintendo thinking Wii was the stuff and unique works almost put themselves to death with that WiiU atrocity again this time the third wheel and almost a flat one at that.  Nintendo proved almost to fatality trying to run a three person race and you not being the lead, cuts you from developer good graces to as far as intentional sabotage of the format.  Fragmentation is just bad, truly bad, when so much ends up on one, the other gets a noticeable smaller cut and anything outside that is just short lived for quality (if not existence) toast.

 

They figured out you can't play in a three way race so then they consolidated handheld and console market into one and they're doing fantastic because they forced a two person race with them as this ulterior option, the Switch.

[derFunkenstein]

On 7/26/2019 at 4:39 PM, godslabrat said:

Personally, and I realize this is a minority opinion, I think the industry suffers when there are three systems, as opposed to two.  The classic era is one example, the PS2 era is another.  

Certainly the companies making the systems suffer. The collapse of Sega in the PS1/Saturn/N64 generation, the company's exit from gaming in the next. Nintendo had a really rough go of it in the Wii U era, and the only reason the Switch is successful is due to its portable nature and Nintendo's abandonment of the 3DS. And then of course when you go back to the late 70s, the countryside is littered with the hollowed husks of ambitious toy companies.

[zzip]

On 7/26/2019 at 12:07 PM, Flojomojo said:

So I just learned that Coleco was all set to make home versions of Phoenix and Vanguard until Atari came in and scooped them. The same thing happened with Parker Brothers and Popeye.

Having lots of 3rd party developers certainly helped the Atari 2600 gain dominance, because it had so much choice. But did the competition among different platforms (Atari, Mattel, Coleco, Philips) hurt or help the industry as a whole? Could a monopoly/standard have delayed or prevented the crash? Or would a single development house not have the resources to make all the arcade ports that drove a large amount of demand in those days?

Atari wanted a monopoly on producing 2600 content.   They took Activision to court over it.   Activision won.

 

Compare the games produced before and after Activision came.   While there was certainly a lot of shovelware,  the production values of 2600 games also notably increased after 1981/82.

 

I don't think competition had anything to do with the crash.   Under normal circumstances, too much competition means that the weakest die off, but total sales stay stable, increasing or decreasing a few percent every year.   But what happened in the 80s is the public just lost interest in games.    According to wikipedia,  $3.2 billion was spent on games in 1982,  and it fell to just $100 million in 1985.   That's more like a bubble,  like the Beanie Baby craze or something.  After Pac-man fever hit, everybody wanted in.   Then a few years later, nobody did.   Classic bubble.   Like dotcom stocks, it eventually recovered and became a stable market.

[+wongojack]

I think that it probably did hurt classic gaming a little.  If I'm just thinking about the pre-crash landscape, there were too many choices if you included all the computer platforms.  Consumers went in different directions (or just left the market as zzip points out).

 

Perhaps if there had been less brand fragmentation things would have been better.  If the Atari computers and 5200 were compatible with each other AND the 2600 for example, maybe that would have kept a few more consumers in the market.

 

It is interesting how the standard for the joystick interface seemed to NOT be fragmented.  At least the different manufacturers mostly saw the benefit of that.

[mr_me]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

Atari wanted a monopoly on producing 2600 content.   They took Activision to court over it.   Activision won.

...

Atari sued former employees for theft of trade secrets.  They settled and Activation paid Atari a license royalty on every cartridge.  Activation stayed in business so I guess they won.  If Atari wanted a closed system they could have attempted some security system on the 5200; they didn't as far as I know.  Coleco published cartridges developed by third parties.  Did they assist them with development guides.

 

8 hours ago, zzip said:

...

Compare the games produced before and after Activision came.   While there was certainly a lot of shovelware,  the production values of 2600 games also notably increased after 1981/82.

...

Competition from Intellivision also helped increase the quality of Atari cartrdges, particularly with sports cartridges.  That and rom prices dropping and experience gained by programmers.

[Keatah]

Maybe. I would imagine ports of games from system to the other would equal things out. And at the same time, cause the consumer to be spread thinly across a larger market.

 

I personally lost interest in cartridge based systems when I discovered disk-based software could be the exact same as what was on a cartridge. Given the choice I would go with disk-based storage because it was easily hacked with a sector editor and I could put my name in there and change the game text. And while the games were the same whether published on cart or disk, generally, disk had more potential and storage space available.

[mr_me]

I think a lot of people went with floppy disk based systems, i.e. computers, because they could pirate video games.  It more than made up for the extra cost of hardware.  But it wasn't for everyone.

Edited July 30, 2019 by mr_me

[Keatah]

45 minutes ago, mr_me said:

I think a lot of people went with floppy disk based systems, i.e. computers, because they could pirate video games.

It was often said that my buddy can get me free games. Not so with carts.

 

The reason sometimes given by the press was that cartridge-based systems were limited in future expandability. And that computers were the wave of the future. Comps were also big in education whether it be self-taught programming or interactive a/v devices in schools.

 

My dad always used to ask the hard question, "Yes, but what can you do with it?" And besides a few niche business tasks and word processing, nothing. Early comps were too tedious to use for things like car repair records or other home chores. Other applications like speech recognition and synthesis were still laboratory experiments regardless of how hard they were pushed.

 

[mr_me]

In those days, besides playing video games, another use for home computers was programming video games.

 

There was certainly a shift in video games from consoles to computers in 1983/84 (in north america).  Statistically it's considered a different market/industry.  Despite the fact most of these computers took cartridges, (another reason) video game publishers preferred floppies because the manufacturing turn around was so much quicker; days vs months.

Edited July 30, 2019 by mr_me

[HoshiChiri]

Ironically, a more evenly fragmented market would likely have fared better, becuase the shovelware titles thrown out by startups wanting in on the videogame action would have had to choose a console to support, so they'd be less to clog up any one library. Atari's dominance meant all the crap games landed there, saturating the market & wearing down customer trust/interest until they quit playing.

 

I'm not sure there's much point trying to figure out how many systems I senough, becuase there's always been more than two, and only once where there wasn't a clear runaway leader- Genesis vs. SNES, of course. Yes, eventually PS3 caught up with 360, but for most of their active life cycles, 360 was the dominant system (Wii notwithstanding.)

 

Success seems to have a lot less to do with the number of machines out there, and more to do with just making sure there's enough good games on your system to outshine the chuff. It's why I worry about modern games, which seem so set on chasing the microtransaction that they're homogenizing themselves into another crash.

Edited July 30, 2019 by HoshiChiri

[CatPix]

4 minutes ago, HoshiChiri said:

Ironically, a more evenly fragmented market would likely have fared better, becuase the shovelware titles thrown out by startups wanting in on the videogame action would have had to choose a console to support, so they'd be less to clog up any one library. Atari's dominance meant all the crap games landed there, saturating the market & wearing down customer trust/interest until they quit playing.

It would be interesting then to compare with the European computer market in the 8 bits era, because oh boy, that was some market fragmentation.With 3 main platforms being the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and C64, followed by that Atari 8 bits, MSX, CoCo, TI99A and then we delve into local markets with either local or foreign machine getting a slice of the market too (Thomson computers in France, I think there were Olivetti computers in Italy, etc...)

 

 

[mr_me]

10 hours ago, HoshiChiri said:

Ironically, a more evenly fragmented market would likely have fared better, because the shovelware titles thrown out by startups wanting in on the videogame action would have had to choose a console to support, so they'd be less to clog up any one library. Atari's dominance meant all the crap games landed there, saturating the market & wearing down customer trust/interest until they quit playing.

....

The Atari 2600 shovelware affected publishers of all systems at the time.  Retailers have an inventory budget and in order to stock new cartridges they have to either sell or return cartridges from their inventory.  Unlike Mattel and Atari cartridges many of these new publishers cartridges that weren't selling couldn't be returned.  Some of them went out of business.  In the old Imagic documentary they touched on how Imagic was having trouble getting their cartridges in stores.  And Imagic made decent cartridges.

[DragonGrafx-16]

On 7/29/2019 at 2:53 PM, wongojack said:

It is interesting how the standard for the joystick interface seemed to NOT be fragmented.  At least the different manufacturers mostly saw the benefit of that.

Even the Genesis had the same interface, just with some extra buttons.

[HoshiChiri]

2 hours ago, mr_me said:

The Atari 2600 shovelware affected publishers of all systems at the time.  Retailers have an inventory budget and in order to stock new cartridges they have to either sell or return cartridges from their inventory.  Unlike Mattel and Atari cartridges many of these new publishers cartridges that weren't selling couldn't be returned.  Some of them went out of business.  In the old Imagic documentary they touched on how Imagic was having trouble getting their cartridges in stores.  And Imagic made decent cartridges.

I will admit, I'm too young to have witnessed any of it- but based on my modern day observations, terrible games do have a small audience. In an evenly fragmented market, the overall games for sale for any specific system would be less, meaning less bad games to sour someone on their chosen system. Plus, those games might sell through better to the niche audience of folks who like such things.

 

Although, it would also mean less space for any specific game to occupy for any given system, so it could be even harder for smaller publishers to get in. So, perhaps the market crash wouldn't have occurred, but the A-tier selection would be less from small companies unable to get a foothold in a tighter market? It's a thought at least.

13 hours ago, CatPix said:

It would be interesting then to compare with the European computer market in the 8 bits era, because oh boy, that was some market fragmentation.With 3 main platforms being the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and C64, followed by that Atari 8 bits, MSX, CoCo, TI99A and then we delve into local markets with either local or foreign machine getting a slice of the market too (Thomson computers in France, I think there were Olivetti computers in Italy, etc...)

 

 

I would love to see that comparison! I did think of that when making my post, but I'm not familiar enough with the European microcomputer market to have any idea just how divided up things were.

[Zap!]

On 7/26/2019 at 5:39 PM, godslabrat said:

Personally, and I realize this is a minority opinion, I think the industry suffers when there are three systems, as opposed to two.  The classic era is one example, the PS2 era is another.  

When was there ever just two systems in a generation? Fairchild and the VHS in 1977 is all that I can think of.

 

Edit: Do you mean two successful systems, and not counting the ones that are behind? 

Edited July 31, 2019 by Zap!

[mbd30]

On 7/26/2019 at 5:46 PM, John Stamos Mullet said:

I think the bigger thing that kills it is sticker shock. When Atari was competing with Coleco and Mattel and all their top systems were $150 and each game was $30-$50 in 1984 money. These things are expensive and having to choose based on game availability doesn't help.

 

Yeah. We got an Atari 2600 (This was either 1983 or 1984) because it was much cheaper than Colecovision.

 

[mr_me]

When the atari 2600 and then intellivision came out at US$200 (1977) and US$300 (1980), they were expensive and few families could afford them; about us$900 in today's dollars.  Cartridges at us$35 were somewhat reasonable compared with NES cartridges a few years later. 

 

When colecovision came out, I was shocked how inexpensive it was; less than half the price of what intellivision sold at just a few months earlier.  Atari and Mattel were forced to drop their price to half of colecovision. (Atari also had the troubled 5200 to compete with colecovision). Families that couldn't afford a video game system now could.  This often happens; as new systems are introduced they compete against the system they are replacing for a period of time.

Edited July 31, 2019 by mr_me

[zzip]

11 hours ago, HoshiChiri said:

I will admit, I'm too young to have witnessed any of it- but based on my modern day observations, terrible games do have a small audience. In an evenly fragmented market, the overall games for sale for any specific system would be less, meaning less bad games to sour someone on their chosen system. Plus, those games might sell through better to the niche audience of folks who like such things.

I think the bigger issue was these shovelware games ended up in the discount bins.   There had not been discount bins for video games prior to this, and suddenly consumers with $30 could decide between a single full-price game, or or 6 $5 games.   And the bargin bin game weren't all terrible, so people went back for more and the sales of the full-priced games suffered.

 

I also don't buy the "people soured on a flood of bad games" theory of the crash.   I lived through the times,  I remember clearly what happened.  Pac-man launched a craze.   Like any pop-culture craze- nearly everybody jumps on the bandwagon.  Video games were the hottest thing for the next two years.  But all crazes die out.  The bandwagon people move onto the next big thing.  As I recall that was MTV--  especially Michael Jackson.   Like the Disco fad, Video games became distinctly uncool for a few years (backlash).   Sales started to crater Christmas 82, just as all these fly-by-night companies were bringing their games to market.  They went out of business almost as fast as they sprung up because the market they expected to tap into simply evaporated.  

 

Retailers realized it was just a fad, and wanted out.   They dumped their stock, it became harder and harder to find games and consoles in stores.   By 85, just about the only place you could find a decent selection of new games was Toys R Us.  Everyone else had mostly leftovers in a corner they couldn't get rid of.   That's about when Nintendo showed up with the NES.  But they had to famously put a useless robot in their system because retailers were not interested in another games console otherwise.

 

In the meantime, those of us still into video games were enjoying the flood of cheap games.    Before the crash, people only cared about the games from the bigger publishers like Atari, Coleco, Activision, Imagic, Mattel Parker Brothers.   Barely anybody talked about or cared about games from Spectravision, US Games, Games By Apollo, Xonix, etc -- the ones who supposedly caused the crash.  We only discovered those games from the bargain bin.   Like ET, their failure to sell was a symptom of the crash, not the cause of it.   If any single game caused the crash, it was probably 2600 Pacman.   That game was so highly anticipated, and actually sold extremely well, and was disappointing to so many people, and just a few months later at Christmas 82 video games became a tough sell.   But I don't think even a good Pacman cartridge would have stopped the crash.  People would have still inevitably lost interest in that fad

 

[CatPix]

Seeing from outside (Europe), the Krach is indeed more than just "Pac-Man and ET". There are numerous factors that acted together to make that Krach - which is more and more referred by people as "Atari Krach" since it mostly affected Atari and was caused by them.

If you read about it, video games in the US were indeed considered as a fad - there are references to a "1977 Pong Krach" due to the glut of machines produced that year; though with the Channel F and VCS coming that year, that "almost-krach" was unnoticed and the drop in Pong sales was attributed to the availability of better machines.

 

It is significant that with the exception of Atari, the big sellers of the era were toy makers (Mattel, Colecovision) as video gaming was considered as a toy fad.

The VES/Channel F was conceived under the argument that Fairchild would more easily market the F8 CPU if they had an "useful" and innovative product to show.

It's kind of the same reason why Philips developed the Interton/1292 APVS console, to market the CPU and video chip they acquired.

Else, video gaming was considered a fad to come, and as soon as the market showed signs of slowing down (caused by Atari's own mistake of pushing more carts on the market than there were systems to play them) it was a signal for retailers to stop and drop it.

If video gaming as a whole was a fad it would have affected computers too, but in fact, sales of computers, mostly the C64, jumped in the US, as gamers and companies moved to more stable platforms - considering that at the time computer was considered the future of gaming.

 

[zzip]

37 minutes ago, CatPix said:

If video gaming as a whole was a fad it would have affected computers too, but in fact, sales of computers, mostly the C64, jumped in the US, as gamers and companies moved to more stable platforms - considering that at the time computer was considered the future of gaming.

It's true that the people still into video games by 1983-1984 started buying computers like the C64, TI99/4a and Atari.   But the sales of these systems and sales of games on these systems in that time period didn't come close to matching the sales of games during the height of the 1981-82 craze.  It's not that the entirety of video games was a fad, but much of astronomical growth of the industry in 81-82 was due to the fad.   Classic bubble