20th February 2010, 1:10 AM
Yeah, the fact that Atari didn't think of the licensing system -- that's something Nintendo came up with -- definitely was a key cause of the crash. Had Atari actually had some control over the games on their system, had they, Coleco, etc. been making money from third party releases on their consoles, I think that the crash may well have not been as bad... but they hadn't thought of it yet, and the licensing system didn't exist until Nintendo brought videogaming back and used it as a key part of their model.