I appreciate your experience/take on gaming.

If you where to start gaming again (at least, as the current vendors intend) you'd find that the bugs you had to account for in the 80s have been (generally speaking) resolved as a byproduct of the DRM/Cloud streaming propagation we're all complaining about.

IE; consolidation of vendors, locking down the way a game propagates, restricting the lifetime of a game, made it "easier" to play games the absolute one way the vendor intends. This gives them the excuse of "Well, we designed the game to be played via perpetual license through only this platform, we can't support or claim responsibility anywhere else".

Which is to say, your comment made me think that the reason the industry is the way it is isn't because money/lawyers, but more because some product managers decades ago began pushing for consolidating/defining video game lifecycles.