I invite you to read this excerpt from an interview with Chris Crawford, game designer in the 80s. It's from a book about Game Design. He was talking about the computer game industry crash of the early 90s. He then talks about how a CR game (Wing Commander) affected the whole industry back then (and now). Draw your own conclusions, but mine is: history repeats itself? (lol) " ... My big hope then was that we could maybe rebuild the industry along more rational lines. And, you know, there was a real chance there. That was the crucial moment of truth for the computer games industry, the period from ’85 through ’87. And it took the wrong turn. Actually, 1990 was when the fate of the industry was sealed. And if anything sealed it, it was Chris Roberts’ Wing Commander. But we had a real opening there for a while; it looked like we might pull it off. How do you think Wing Commander sealed the fate of the industry? The big question for the industry in 1985 was what, if anything, will sell? Nobody seemed to know for sure, but there were a few strands. The fact that Balance of Power was a huge hit suggested to people that perhaps serious games might have a future, or at least games that weren’t video games. And there was a lot of excitement about exploring some of those ideas. The other games that were a big success back then were the whole series of Infocom games, which continued to do well right through the crash. Because they were clearly different from video games. Yes. And you put those two together, and it pointed strongly in one direction. So there was a lot of effort in that direction. The industry was still torn because it was so much easier to design the video games, and they did seem to sell to a group of people who weren’t affected by the crash. We really teetered on that fence. Which way are we going to go? Video games, or a broad range of game possibilities? What sealed it was Wing Commander, for two reasons. The main thing that Wing Commander did that doomed the industry was that it bought market share. That is, Wing Commander was a hugely expensive program to write. It’s funny, Chris Roberts has denied that it cost much, but that’s because of some creative internal accounting. Back in those days, around 1990, a typical budget for a game would be $100,000 to $200,000. There were some done cheaper, but $300,000 was a very expensive game. Wing Commander probably cost about $1,000,000. By the standards of the day that was considered absurd. And in fact, I’ve been told by an Origin insider that Wing Commander by itself never paid back its investment, but that the follow-ups and add-ons did. But what they were really doing was spending so much money that it would only work if it became the top hit. It did. The problem then was, they’ve raised the bar for the whole industry, we all have to produce $1,000,000 games, and unfortunately they can only work if each one is the number one game. And you can only have one number one game. So that, in turn, forced the industry to become much more conservative. We’ve got these huge expenses, we simply can’t make money turning out a number twenty game. Anything less than being in the top ten will lose money. So very quickly it became a hit-driven business. That was already starting in the late ’80s, but Wing Commander sealed it. So once it became a hit-driven industry, the whole marketing strategy, economics, and everything changed, in my opinion, much for the worse. The other thing was that Wing Commander also seemed to reestablish or reconfirm the role of the action game as the wave of the future. And basically that’s where the industry solidified, and the cement has now set.