When I wrote about games in the late 90's and early 2000's I noticed the same sort of market tendencies occurring. The one thing they all had in common? End of console life cycles.<br><br>It's REAL easy to point out market dips when an impending recession is rumored. And with tech, it's easy to point out quality issues AFTER said take has had a pretty extensive lifespan.,(reply>), Another thing worth noting on the dev/publisher side? Don't confuse the two. Devs <b>usually</b> have more content than needed before a game goes green [pre-launch] and a publisher decides when &amp; what they want for a game to go gold [launch-ready]<br><br>A botched release typically means a dev team couldn't meet deadlines a publisher imposed due to QA testing and bug crushing.<br><br>On that, we should look at how devs [especially with Red Dead 2] were and are treated to push these massive games out. They are treated inhumane and it doesn't get the coverage it needs.