They get the 80's crash analysis all wrong. There was never a demand implosion due to uncertainty of quality. These were 8 bit sprites. Crap was standard. Crap

They get the 80's crash analysis all wrong. There was never a demand implosion due to uncertainty of quality. These were 8 bit sprites. Crap was standard. Crap was good. All 8-bit console games look low quality compared to the first 8-bit computer games. We still bought. Something way more important was the first widely-available consumer 8-bit computers. Compare Atari 2600 Pac-man to Atari 400 Pac-man... and that's not the Atari XL line. No consideration of a sudden shift in early adopters to Atari XL and Commodore 64 computers?? What year did those drop 82-83? The games for those PC-precursors were 1) way better and 2) pirate's booty. The abilities of those machines moved beyond what could be packed into consoles and the margins seemed higher. The price for a game went to free. That meant you could buy second floppy drives, 300 baud modems, dot matrix printers (24 pins FTW!) instead of games. Computer clubs were not uncommon and literal swap meets of 5.5" floppies. Early modems gained access to BBS's and created cornucopias of free software - legit and not. They should also review Master's of Doom and get insight into the personalities behind the seminal FPS. There were no marketers outside of the dev team there. They were making something they loved to play and they loved the thrill/hilarity of over-the-top power and gross-out humor. If you want to empower or blame the feedback loop of marketing driving development, you shouldn't ignore all the history prior to the present-day machine. Thank goodness they are writing an article which confirms that the world is changing because women aren't sitting quietly by, letting history be written by loud-mouthed men any more. But it's an awkward dance to read trying to fill enough space to provide ample vertical scrolling to get a sense for why it took so many people to construct the page...