> If anything, the amount of shovelware sharply decreased over time.
Seriously? Have you seen the Nintendo and Steam stores? I mean, it's great that game development is so accessible now, but the amount of low quality and half-baked or abandoned Early Access games is staggering.
> Then there was the Internet with increasingly many free reviews, especially once online advertising took off and game magazines moved to the Web, and finally we got accessible average user ratings from Steam or Metacritic.
Reviews don't mean much when publishers enforce embargos, or when they invest in marketing to create hype and drive preorders, only to deliver a broken game at launch with promises to patch it over time. Or when they're gamed by review bombing one way or the other, depending on some internet drama. Or when review sites are given different weights in calculating the overall score, leading to alternatives like OpenCritic. So, yeah, reviews can be helpful, but they're far from reliable.
> If a game is bad today, everyone will know it.
Ehh, highly doubtful, as I mentioned above. And even if there are negative reviews, companies have many different ways of hiding how bad a game is, and still profiting from them despite of it. They can launch a broken/unfinished game, patch it over time, and still end up with good will from consumers because of the work they put into it. See No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. This way they profit from preorders, take as much time as they want to deliver the experience they advertised (while continuing to sell a half-baked product), and ultimately end up with an unscathed reputation so they can do it again. Then there are outright scams like The Day Before, countless asset flips, lazy ports, etc. Mobile gaming is infested with this garbage.
However you define "bad game", these products are certainly hostile to the consumer and there should be regulation in place to prevent them. This situation is far worse than the one that led to the 1983 crash, yet gaming has never been as popular as it is today.
Seriously? Have you seen the Nintendo and Steam stores? I mean, it's great that game development is so accessible now, but the amount of low quality and half-baked or abandoned Early Access games is staggering.
> Then there was the Internet with increasingly many free reviews, especially once online advertising took off and game magazines moved to the Web, and finally we got accessible average user ratings from Steam or Metacritic.
Reviews don't mean much when publishers enforce embargos, or when they invest in marketing to create hype and drive preorders, only to deliver a broken game at launch with promises to patch it over time. Or when they're gamed by review bombing one way or the other, depending on some internet drama. Or when review sites are given different weights in calculating the overall score, leading to alternatives like OpenCritic. So, yeah, reviews can be helpful, but they're far from reliable.
> If a game is bad today, everyone will know it.
Ehh, highly doubtful, as I mentioned above. And even if there are negative reviews, companies have many different ways of hiding how bad a game is, and still profiting from them despite of it. They can launch a broken/unfinished game, patch it over time, and still end up with good will from consumers because of the work they put into it. See No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. This way they profit from preorders, take as much time as they want to deliver the experience they advertised (while continuing to sell a half-baked product), and ultimately end up with an unscathed reputation so they can do it again. Then there are outright scams like The Day Before, countless asset flips, lazy ports, etc. Mobile gaming is infested with this garbage.
However you define "bad game", these products are certainly hostile to the consumer and there should be regulation in place to prevent them. This situation is far worse than the one that led to the 1983 crash, yet gaming has never been as popular as it is today.