As an early 80s mom, dad, or child (the people who made the buying choices for video games) how do you decide what games to buy? When a dozen games are made a year and they are all generally good you can buy based on what looks interesting. Moreover, with such a small number of products the chance that someone you know has already played a recently released game and can give you an opinion on it is high. This meant that consumers had a high chance of getting something good just based on blind buying decisions and they also had a fairly easy time of learning about the gems. When the video game bubble hit full force the market was flooded with hundreds of games, many of them low quality, far too many for people to keep up with.

The system broke down, the chances of buying a good game just on chance were low, and thus the chances that any of your friends had happened to buy a good game was also low. It only took a few times of people getting burned for them to stop taking the risk and to curtail their game buying, staying content with the existing library of games they had. Even though there were still many quality games (donkey kong jr, joust, ms. pac man, and pole position were all released in '83), there was so much crap that people simply withdrew from the market. Moreover, the bubble was reliant on an unlikely massive growth spurt in video game buying, the game industry over leveraged itself, it would have crashed even without a collapse of consumer confidence.