It's 1983 all over again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Not really. The market is large and fairly mature, it's doing fine and continuing to grow. The video game crash is titled that for a reason, the market shrunk by 97% in a short period.

There are a large number of amateur creators who are trying to win the lottery (either from a fame or monetary perspective), and most won't and will see little recognition and remain obscure or very niche.

This is seen in basically every area of media. Music, books, movies, etc and is perfectly normal.

>In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games". In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards.

In 2017, 21 games per day were released on Steam and most of them were trash.

The Atari crash was more akin to the .com bubble. Vaporware and no way to tell what was in the bag until you bought it. Video games are a giant mature market dominated by big companies with sophisticated business models. Just like web businesses these days.

I’d say sports, too. TV made it so some players were playing for hundreds of thousands of people nationally while others still entertained only locally.

It’s also in the process of starting to hit indie development in general and startups. It’s an interesting process but life for your typical indie or startup SaaS is going to get as tough as life for the typical “App Developer” got a few years ago.

Do you ever think about getting back into games?

Sometimes. But Empire was a bestselling game, and it still didn't work out to much money. My hourly rate was pathetic :-)