> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. The costs to produce cartridges are orders of magnitude higher than

> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. The costs to produce cartridges are orders of magnitude higher than digital distribution. Retail storefronts are also limited in ways digital stores are not. > The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. The C64 was a home computer that encouraged user programming and development. The Atari 2600 was marketed as an entertainment device for consuming content. If the content is no good, the C64 can still get by but the 2600 loses its purpose. > But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down? The NES locking out unapproved developers was really more about having the PR to say "Nintendo blessed this game" than trying to avoid another crash (which I don't think Nintendo at home cared about when developing the Famicom, as Japan never had a corresponding gaming crash). And of course profit. Nintendo does care about that. Gaming was new enough in the 70s that in the minds of many it could have just been another fad, and the Atari crash helped "prove" that theory out. So there wasn't a big movement or anything to "save gaming" - as far as normal Americans were concerned, video games were just another pet rock and kids were going to glom onto something else soon enough. Psychologically, it made the medium "easy to abandon." Then Nintendo came and saved American gaming from itself, and the rest is history.