In the 1980s my family went and visited friends in Queens for a week in August. Down the street from the house there was a small shop with an arcade machine with Legendary Wings. Every day I’d start out with a fistful of quarters and pop them into the machine to get round after round. Eventually I purchased a version of the game for the original NES, and got so proficient at it that I could win basically on mental autopilot.

I thought of that when listening to a story on the radio about the decline of the home video gaming industry as a revenue generator. Here’s the relevant section of the transcript:

HENN: It’s in a state of flux. Sales and revenue for the big gaming consoles — like Nintendo and Xbox — actually fell last year something like 13 percent. It’s still a $10 billion industry, but that was a big drop.

VIGELAND: It is indeed. What’s going on?

HENN: Some of the smartest people in the industry say the price of what people are willing to pay for an hour of entertainment, for a video game, is dropping like a rock. Bing Gordon was the creative director for ...