[posterboy]

Piracy of 100 in 1 cartidges for Game Boy was a thing along with Adibas bootleg. Memory was limited and the games are simple because of it. I had a 1 in 4 with space invaders and that was a comparatively shitty game but a hit on Atari (minimum viable product, worse than asteroids). So what killed Atari was extremely low quality, plain and simple.

You may have a point on price control, because I saw no main titles, and I remeber more recently the Mame community held back on (highly priced) arcade titles to not compete with sales. But you present a false dichotomy because quality control is marketing.

[philistine]

See, you're taking the point of view that it must happen through the prism of the player. That it has to be something the player has agency with, in this case, video game quality. I'll push back on that. Devs were making games for a console more akin to a tin can with a string than a computer. Most developers made their games alone, with very tight time constraints. Code quality was nowhere what it is today, due to the tooling. There were hard limits to what they could offer the player, so of course games look terrible with hindsight.

You can listen to They Create Worlds. They very expertly talked about the preconceived ideas about the crash, and why they're wrong.

http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/the-great-video-game-c...