5 ms·

I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and majo

I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control (i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years, when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release, we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system. Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples: PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market. R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.

fwonkas 13y ago
Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.
- irishcoffee 13y ago
  I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.
- DanielleMolloy 13y ago
  @fwonkas: OK, thanks for clarifying this!
ANTSANTS 13y ago
The GP wasn't saying that exercising quality control as a platform holder is a bad idea, just that Nintendo engaged in some ethically dubious practices at the time. The most obvious evidence: Nintendo did excellently in Japan while exerting significantly less pressure than they did on companies that wished to produce games for the American market. The Famicom had no lockout chip. Nintendo did not impose a strict 3 game per-year limit in the Japanese market like they did in America. Third parties were allowed to manufacture their own game cartridges; there is direct physical evidence of this fact in the varying shapes and vibrant colors of the cartridges themselves[1], and the existence of customs ICs and discrete mapper designs common in Famicom cartriges. In addition to slimming margins for third party developers, this also made supply and demand problems very difficult to deal with, as tinco mentioned. Remember how Nintendo infamously forbade third party devs from publishing games for competing platforms in America? Didn't happen in Japan, and so a fair amount of early Famicom games received ports to the MSX and other Japanese computers. The Famicom did have some amount of Atari 2600-goldrush-esque crappy games (some licensed, some not), but it didn't stop the console from being a huge success. This suggests to me that Nintendo's reasoning was only part "Americans will flood the market with shitty games again if we don't do something about it," with pure monopolistic greed being the other part. With all due respect to Hiroshi Yamauchi, I don't think their business practices during this era should be considered at all admirable, and I don't think it's right to credit their monopolistic practices for "saving the medium."

fwonkas 13y ago

Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.

irishcoffee 13y ago
I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.
DanielleMolloy 13y ago
@fwonkas: OK, thanks for clarifying this!

ANTSANTS 13y ago

The GP wasn't saying that exercising quality control as a platform holder is a bad idea, just that Nintendo engaged in some ethically dubious practices at the time. The most obvious evidence: Nintendo did excellently in Japan while exerting significantly less pressure than they did on companies that wished to produce games for the American market. The Famicom had no lockout chip. Nintendo did not impose a strict 3 game per-year limit in the Japanese market like they did in America. Third parties were allowed to manufacture their own game cartridges; there is direct physical evidence of this fact in the varying shapes and vibrant colors of the cartridges themselves[1], and the existence of customs ICs and discrete mapper designs common in Famicom cartriges. In addition to slimming margins for third party developers, this also made supply and demand problems very difficult to deal with, as tinco mentioned. Remember how Nintendo infamously forbade third party devs from publishing games for competing platforms in America? Didn't happen in Japan, and so a fair amount of early Famicom games received ports to the MSX and other Japanese computers. The Famicom did have some amount of Atari 2600-goldrush-esque crappy games (some licensed, some not), but it didn't stop the console from being a huge success. This suggests to me that Nintendo's reasoning was only part "Americans will flood the market with shitty games again if we don't do something about it," with pure monopolistic greed being the other part. With all due respect to Hiroshi Yamauchi, I don't think their business practices during this era should be considered at all admirable, and I don't think it's right to credit their monopolistic practices for "saving the medium."