Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
Fair, but ET was such an awful debacle that it killed Atari as a company and paved the way for Japanese companies to take over the entire market for the next couple of decades.
Now it’s just business as usual.
Actually that’s incorrect, ET is pretty innovative game for its time, and isn’t anywhere near as bad as people recall… It just has the legacy of killing Atari as a company.
People who don’t know the full story assume that the game’s low quality did it in. Not quite, while the game is a bit confusing, it’s actually far more playable than most on the system and is perfectly servicable if you know what you’re doing. Hell it’s even one of the only Atari game with a title screen and title screen music! (Most just drop you off at the game instantly)
Not the reason why ET killed the market was because they went all in on ET expecting it to be this hot item, they published countless cartridges, and billed their entire Christmas marketing campaign around the game… doing all kinds of special discounts for it, etc. They went so all in that there were literally over twice as many ET Carts as there were Atari games
This worked and the game sold like hotcakes…
Problem: There were too many damn ET cartridges, so everyone buys ET and gives each other ET, because of the absurd number of cartridges and stores unloading them on customers… the day after Christmas was spent with everyone trying to return countless unsellable ET carts because there are literally more of those than there are people who could even feasibly play the damn thing.
So no, the developer didn’t put in a stinker THAT bad (Again, it’s actually a really impressive game for the system, showcasing features that would become standard for the NES), the publisher just assumed that ET would be so big an IP that people would literally buy 6 copies "Just cause they like ET that much’
Which obviously, no one was going to do no matter how much they loved the movie or the game!
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There have always been incomplete / broken games. Now they can be fixed. I agree the day 1 patch is annoying, as well as “I haven’t played this in a while… Oh, now I can’t because it needs to patch” but it’s still an improvement over “this is broken and can never be fixed.”