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Video games
Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then
Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry
Steam, too. It was originally unpopular DRM for Half-Life 2. It had a broken offline mode that could only be selected when already online. It had no meaningful customer service and people permanently lost their accounts with no avenue for appeal (and probably no human even involved).
It was originally unpopular DRM and a launcher for Counterstrike. I think Valve was trying to take a page out of Battle.net's book. The Half Life 2 thing came afterwards, and if it weren't for that Steam probably would have just been yet another failed footnote in gaming history.
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a "family computer" system, not a game console.
I have a copy of ET my dad got for my older brother when he was a kid. Dunno if it or the Atari even still work.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.
I used to have an old shareware floppy of wolf3d as well.
they got lucky with pokemon IP, at least in the early 2000s pokemon wasnt really making much bank as it is now.
Who will save us now?
Indie games
The shovelware filling the stores by indie developers will save us? Ps Store always had some cheap mid, but they had effort put in, like ssarpbc (supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars) for 1$ on sale always later became rocket league.
No? The innumerable indie games that are actually good like the Outer Wilds, Stormworks, Hades, Eco, Highfleet, Beam.NG, Avorion, 7 Days to Die, Factorio, Dinkum, Deep Rock Galactic (is that one indie?), Derail Valley, Risk of Rain, and Barotrauma just to name a few.
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
We're at the point where you can play all sorts of emulated games on mobile. There are near infinite bangers to play right now.
And best of all, even iOS has emulators now! For a while they were banned on the app store IIRC. Now there are pretty good emulators there.
I did not get very far with my first ever playthrough of Ocarina of Time personally. But I've played plenty of Pokemon Emerald over the years.
And I THINK there was a company out there trying to revive old mobile games that were actually good (think original Angry Birds) so they'd work on modern phones. I dunno if that took off sadly, though...
Apple did make an effort with Apple Arcade. The idea is it’s a curated list of decent indie games, none of which have monetization. But, you pay a monthly fee for them.
Not all of them Indie tbh, there are plenty of Arcade versions of popular games that normally have MTX or ads.
But yes, you also get some indie gems that normally are a one time purchase, and I believe some games specially developed for the Arcade.
Hilariously, Civ 7 is on there, but my phone has an A16 and it requires A17. And I stopped my sub a while ago
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
NES also introduced verification so you couldn't just manufacture random games and take them to market without approval.
Walled gardens - sucky but sometimes genuinely useful to clean up messes and keep them from happening (aka Grandma on her iPhone)