This is a very interesting post, thank you for sharing.You just summed up the 1982-1983 video game crash in just this.
Almost every game released by that time, were becoming crappy games released for too much money.
The famously much-loathed E.T. game cartridge cost (MSRP $34.95) is more than $70 after inflation adjustment, as a 1982 dollar is worth about $3 today.
People like you were disappointed by the millions, after the fantastic advertisement campaigns that made it seem better than sliced bread. The unsold cartridges famously went to the landfill, being the epicenter of the video game crash of 1982.
Even "good" games like Donkey Kong for Atari 2600 was still dissapointing because it didn't have the elevator level or pie level.
Consumer dissapointment at overpriced tepid fare. This saga still continues today. Instead, people have peer pressure of everybody wanting you to play a crappy game. These current games will hitherto stay unmentioned, but y'all get the gist.
I'm very glad for Steam Sales, but not too glad for, em, subscriptions (a 13-letter word!). Or super glad about subscriptions avoiding the $70 capital outlay (blasphemy) but IAP's are now a bit too nickel-and-diming like a Homer Simpson infinite donut feeder.
I have studied and read about the video game crash of the 1980's but as a millennial the closest I came to living through something like this has been the recent microtransaction-ridden smartphone gaming bubble that somewhat deflated 5 years back. I doubt that this was anywhere close to the same magnitude as what the 80's were like, though (smartphone gaming is still quite popular, just the hype wore off). I mean, in the 80's, there must have been a point where people outright forsook console gaming completely. Like you said, even great games got thrown out with the garbage in the midst of that mass rejection. It was so bad that Nintendo basically walked into a dead market in 1985 and reinvented the entire concept of gaming. I mean even Nintendo was so afraid of touching the toxic "console" concept at that time that they marketed the NES as a family computer and had Rob the robot add-on further mask the nature of the NES to consumers.
It's hard to imagine something like that happening today but anything is possible. The 80's crash really showed the power of the consumer and just what people can do when a sufficient number unilaterally decide that enough is enough. That said, I can't imagine how bad the content must have been to drive that many people to such an extreme position. I don't know what culture was like in the 80's though, maybe people weren't as enamoured with gaming as they are today and it was a lot easier to walk away back then.