America is not the only place in the world, and the video game crash was not a worldwide phenomena.
The crash occurred because the market was flooded with cheaply made, poor quality, simplistic games, which were about all many of these consoles were capable of running. People became bored of them.
There's basically no comparison between these consoles and the NES. The NES was vastly superior and hence allowed the creation of much more involving games.
By contrast the early to mid 80s in the UK and Europe looked quite different: here it was the 8-bit computers that ruled the roost. These had more memory, and often better graphics and sound capabilities. Again, this allowed for the creation of more involving games. As a result many of the machines - and perhaps the C64 the most - had great libraries of games. And of course they were programmable and affordable, which made them vastly more interesting to homebrew hackers on a budget. (Apple and IBM machines were considerably more expensive.)
Not that there is anything to be done about it it's just when the barrier was higher it forced at least a small increase in "average" quality
I've basically just learned to stay away from Unity games at this point.
I really hate that Unity games are mashed with traditional games as well and that I can't filter that shit out on any popular stores such as steam. Drives me wild.
A full-price Spectrum or Commodore title cost £8-£10 ($30-$40 in today's money), but a budget title cost as little as £2 ($7.50). The low cost of cassette media drove down the price of games, so young gamers could build a collection with their pocket money.
Crash, Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 weren't afraid to slate a bad game, so you could have a reasonable degree of trust in their reviews. Your Sinclair had a regular feature called Crap Games Corner, dedicated to taking the mickey out of genuinely awful games. By the late 80s, all the major magazines had cover tapes with demos or free games.
Nintendo's strict quality control was a particular response to the severe asymmetry of information in the US console games market, but it wasn't the only option.
It wasn't a problem with people getting sick of video games. It was a problem with Americans getting sick of the Atari 2600, other similar video game consoles and the distribution model of cartridges sold in toy stores
The sales of home computers in the US massively increased during the "video game crash", especially sales of the Commodore 64. I suspect those C64s spent the majority of their time playing video games, off floppy disks.
Nintendo must have done their market research, because they clearly identified the source of the problem and cleverly marketed the NES as "Not a video game console" and "Completely different from the Atari 2600".
It took me years to realize that was pronounced "ice pick" and not "i-sep-ick". I didn't know any better.
If they put more emphasis on releasing cartage based titles, bundled a game pad, and made the keyboard an accessory and got the timing right, it would have been a much better device to have in every living room in the 1980s and early 90s.