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 t

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."