Well I was thinking of more like late 80s early to mid 90s. Games were written by actual writers like Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Sid Meir, Raymond Feist, and people like them. I’m thinking of titles by Sierra, Apogee, Activision, Brøderbund, Sir-tech, 3DO, Infocom… you get my meaning, I trust.
If you’re gonna suggest that games like Myst, Zork, all the Quest series by Sierra, the Might & Magics and Wizardry titles - if you think those were made with the kinds of greed that we have today where it’s cheaply made junk with every deceptive money-making practice imaginable… then you may just be younger and not aware of what it was like. Those titles made money, yeah, but they put their heart and soul into the quality of the product and never expected money in the billions. And they got paid ONCE for the game from each customer. And many games gave people years worth of play. Today games popup in your face telling enticing the player to spend money, and they give the player enough progress to think they know what they need to do in order to advance, only to introduce newer currency and demand money for it. Etc etc. there are dozens of tactics to scam people out of continual payments. I don’t play any of the garbage they make today. And I feel so sorry for young people now that they don’t even know what it’s like to get immersed in a game’s creative narrative for months and they already paid for all of it one time.
It’s not a fallacy, I know there were also loser titles back then, and of course. Not everything is a hit. But games like the Krondor series which were written by an actual award winning author (Raymond E. Feist)? Find me anything like that today amongst the sea of sewage. Sorry to be so negative because I know there’s some really great stuff. It’s just afloat in a vast sea of garbage and hard to find. The app shops bury them because they’re not as profitable. Greed has become all-consuming and insatiable. It’s a cancer to the whole industry.
Yeah anyway… no survivorship bias here. I lived through those times of gaming. Fuckin paradise, it was.