Nintendo uses natural selection for its quality control
by Justin McElroy 
{ Oct 25th 2007 at 2:55PM }
"If [publishers] publish for any of the three, if the product does not sell well, it fails on its own. If they cannot get shelf space, it fails on its own. If consumers don't buy it, it fails on its own. So I do think that the poorer stuff does get sifted out and the really good products do rise to the top," Kaplan said.
There's logic to what she's saying, of course. But it must be easy to advocate survival of the fittest when all of your games are Jack Lalanne.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Shagittarius @ Oct 25th 2007 3:01PM
This is what killed games in the 80s. Lets hope the industry is better established, consumers are better educated, and history doesn't repeat.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:08PM
ummmm, you know you could choose to not buy any of the crap on the Wii. No one is forcing you to buy them. I mean if that would have been the reason for the collapse of the game industry, wouldn't it have already happened with the ps2?
Also it seems that you're focusing only one problem that led to the video game crash, when in fact there were multiple problems that led to the crash that aren't apparent in this generation.
F. Rocker or Fernando R.? @ Oct 25th 2007 3:12PM
Well... the problem is the developers... the horrible graphics of most Wii games its not the Wii hardware fault, just look Mario Galaxy, excellents graphics. Or Smash or Metroid.
Or look what Nintendo created in the DS with Phantom Hourglass.
If they want to have good sales, they have to start be professionals and do good games. Period.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:14PM
@F
Agreed.
Slaziman @ Oct 25th 2007 3:23PM
Wow F. Rocker, you are a changed man. Props.
Crono (NDF - Knight of the Old School) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:23PM
From Wikipedia:
The American video game console crash of 1983 was caused by a combination of factors:
The second generation of consoles was the first to be sustained by large libraries of interchangeable software. Interest in consoles has historically sagged after 5 years, and in 1983, Atari's market leader, the 2600, was celebrating its fifth birthday. Without established precedent, the industry was not prepared to take consoles to the next generation, and the long-term delay of Atari's own 7800 consoles left them with little to captivate consumers hungry for the next big thing.
A flood of consoles on the US market giving consumers too many choices. At the time of the US crash, there was a plethora of consoles on the market: Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Bally Astrocade, ColecoVision, Coleco Gemini, Emerson Arcadia 2001, Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyssey2, Mattel Intellivision (and its just-released update with several peripherals, Intellivision II), Sears Tele-Games systems (which included 2600 and Intellivision clones), Tandyvision, VTech CreatiVision, and Vectrex. Each one of these consoles had its own library of games, and many had (in some cases large) third-party libraries. Likewise, many of these same companies announced yet another generation of consoles for 1984, such as the Odyssey3, and Atari 7800.[1]
A flood of poor titles from hastily financed startups, combined with weak high-profile Atari 2600 games such as the game based on the hit movie ET and an infamous port of the popular arcade game Pac-Man. These games were also notoriously overproduced.
The news media sensationalized both the boom days of 1980 and the problems of 1982–83. In particular, the story of Atari burying millions of ET cartridges in a New Mexico landfill[2] shifted the outlook of the video game market in the eyes of many media outlets.
We currently have 1 of these on wii. The others are total reversals, such as the media being in love with the wii, only 3 main competitors instead of dozens, and proprietary software that ONLY plays on its respective console.
There will not be another game crash in cosoles. One could argue, however, that PC games are in the midst of or are heading toward a crash, due to all software playing on the same hardware, tons of shovelware, and the media overall not giving a damn.
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 3:24PM
"...consumers are better educated..."
PS2's 50 Cent: Bulletproof sold over a million copies.
3cubed minus 3squared plus1 @ Oct 25th 2007 3:24PM
Everything except his grammar.
jk :P
Kye (NDF - Earth Ring) @ Oct 25th 2007 5:56PM
Fernando?
There you are!
Man, am I glad to see you.
I was JUST going to write a letter of complaint to Joystiq for banning you. And it was going to be one STERN-ASS letter! (Not that you aren't still banned). But at least you're here.
Where's your NDF Uniform?
Should I relieve N. Fanbot from acting leader duties?
sheppy2.0 @ Oct 25th 2007 9:30PM
Shags, you're partially correct. This was a factor in the collapse but not the only one. Fact of the matter is, when Nintendo was in PS3's position many years ago, Nintendo had many lectures on "Quality vs. Quantity." This was a lecture saying that, while they may not have the most games, they have the best games. This speech delivered the very same month as Superman 64's release but I digress. Likewise, during the Gamecube era, Nintendo delivered a speech on "Megagame." blatantly pointing fingers at the whole industry for crimes they were every bit as guilty of. And now that they are in a position to brag about their crappiles, they NOW think quality over quantity isn't so much a good thing anymore.
And I'm sorry, I've heard the PSX versus Wii parallels before but facing facts, Wii right now looks much worse than the Playstation generation where budget release games were given such ultra crative names as Boxing 2, Superstar Disco, and Space Shooter. Fortunately, although it looks horrible, there will still be a few gems here and there.
F. Rocker,
Actually, Nintendo should be held accountable on the crapflood. This is getting patently ridiculous. And why should Nintendo take some initiative? They are approving these games and they are LICENSING them. These horrible games boot up with the Nintendo name on them. Now, you and I (well, I, since I don't blindly flock to anything dropped from the back end of a cube project) have the ability to research and look into which games are good and which ones are not. Which is great, as informed consumers, we do NOT fall victim to petsimZ dressed up as decent software. But here's the problem. Informed consumers like you and I? Not exactly Nintendo's focus right now. In fact, we're bottom ranked with most of our love coming from Rockstar and Suda51 projects. We're oldschool, jaded, and apparently bored. Thanks, Perrin Kaplan.
The new market is the casual, impulse buyer. This is the problem. Nintendo attaches their name to all these bad games and proceeds to flood the market with crap. Now, as they buy their sixth straight horrible game, who's name will they curse? Mediasoft Megamax's or the one name that is on all the packaging and even the booting up sequence? Dollars to donuts, parents don't know any better and the blame will go to Nintendo. As this trend continues downhill (please god, make Q1 look even remotely better than this awful holiday lineup), it will be Nintendo getting the bad rap on Wii crap floods. So yes, the flood will help severate the wheat from the chaff, but majority of their market right now IS the chaff. Uninformed consumers easily preyed upon.
Kye,
You were going to write a STERN letter about the unfair banning of F Rocker? Dude, do you even KNOW what happened? For four straight days he trolled every Sony topic and for four straight days, Ludwig himself kept giving him warnings until finally banning. He was giving ample opportunity to get the clues being dropped. He chose not to, he was banned. Get over it, suzie.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 10:08PM
@Sheppy
Oh so I guess it's okay that Sony put its name on thousands of licensed games, crappy GTA wannabes, and half-assed rpgs, but apparantly when Nintendo does it, oh man they obviously don't care about their consumer base. But I guess when a console has Final Fantasy or MGS it's very easy to forget the shit that the console also left behind.
Look you wanna know why Nintendo allows even crappy games on its consoles? It's the same reason why Sony did back with the ps2, and it would be the same reason if Micrsoft or Sony was in Nintendo's position today, it's because there is a market for those games. Everyone knows that no matter how bad a game is, there will still be people buying it, that's why bad games exist on every console.
sheppy2.0 @ Oct 26th 2007 12:55AM
Ah yes, Ska Zero....
Somehow I knew you would once again miss the forest for the trees.
Is it somehow okay that Sony did it? Actually, No. No it's not. But here's the difference. Sony never spent three straight E3's talking about how the lack of games on N64 simply meant with fewer games, they were obviously of higher quality. Sony never spent Spaceworld and E3 to talk about "megagame" tactics and how they'll destroy the industry. Also, Sony doesn't have a reputation as a AAA developer of consistant quality (Why Nintendo even has that reputation is beyond me). So is it acceptable that Sony did it? No.
But also, please do me a favor. Pull your head out. Lack of air keeps messing with your wavelengths. As many people have pointed out, Wii looks worse right now than PSX has in the past. By PSX's first holiday season, it had a plethora of AAA titles dropping and a fair amount of decent to good. And then about half the lineup was crap. Wii? Well, with SSBB slipping, I can honestly say that's one game that's AAA, a couple that are great games, and then it slips downhill from there. Once I count the decent ones, I'm left with ten games at most. Out of 79 game coming out between October 1st and December 31st.
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/10/11/nintendo-flaunts-mega-sized-wii-and-ds-release-list/
PSX and PS2 NEVER had a crap/good ratio that bad outside of launch windows. And even then, it was fairly low in titles in general. This is 79 frickin games, man. And it's THIS MANY bad ones? It's this kind of crap floods that kept me from buying DS games for months just because everything I thought looked interesting turnout out to be yet another poorly designed release. And when the things that's keeping me interested in the console in general are countable on one hand, it's getting pretty bad.
Kye (NDF - Earth Ring) @ Oct 26th 2007 5:40AM
Sheppy
NDF Members stick together.
If anyones gona tell him off it'll be me.
Also, my name isn't Suzie.
Thank you for your time, Rapunzel.
Kye.
Slaziman @ Oct 25th 2007 3:06PM
Hahaha, that image is ACE
But with the amount of shovelware on the Wii, some of the less informed people will get pissed that every game they buy after taking a glance at the cover and the back sucks. Shovelware isn't doing any good for anybody but lousy developers.
Timo710 @ Oct 25th 2007 3:10PM
Well that has a logic in it, but it fails where game as : Disney's The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure for DS . A game that reviewers finished in 30 minutes. I mean, Thats stuff that shoudn't reach the shelve, parents buy these for the're kids so the kids can shut up for a day or 2.... Not 30 minutes... and thats why, such a game shouldn't reach shelves, so the parents will buy a good game earlier, like mario. I mean with Super Mario World for GBA, your child is going to have enough fun for the whole holiday ( looking at the skills they have).
So yeah, he has a point.... partially.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:13PM
But keep in mind, that that game is supposed to appeal to kids, not adults.
Timo710 @ Oct 25th 2007 3:16PM
Yeah, but even then, it only had 30 minutes gameplay....
After 30 minutes, the credits would roll.
I mean you pay 1 dollar for each minute you play, thats even way more expensive then the arcade.
3cubed minus 3squared plus1 @ Oct 25th 2007 3:22PM
Unless you sucked at the arcade. Then its about even.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:24PM
But once again,
IT'S FOR KIDS!!
Games for kids are supposed to be short as hell.
Slaziman @ Oct 25th 2007 3:27PM
I looked around the web... could only find 1 review of that game and it gave the game a score of 80, and didn't mention the length...
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 3:29PM
You would have to really suck and/or be playing at an expensive arcade to be wasting $1/minute on even Galaga, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, etc.!
DangerMouse @ Oct 25th 2007 3:50PM
"Unless you sucked at the arcade. Then its about even."
Yeah, Virtua Cop. That was about a dollar for a minute of gameplay for me.
Mr Khan @ Oct 25th 2007 4:31PM
Well, even in their era as the king of draconian quality control, Nintendo allowed a lot of pure shit to wallow on their winning NES
the NES had countless games that were literally unplayable, and that was back when Nintendo was mean about it
Rob Accomando @ Oct 25th 2007 3:12PM
Too bad the average consumer has to spend $40-$50 to find out that a game sucks. Then they are either stuck with it or take a loss reselling it.
Slaziman @ Oct 25th 2007 3:15PM
And as we all know, the average customer rate is very high among Wii owners, so they are likely to suffer most from the shovelware.
To be fair, the PS2 had lots of shovelware as well, and that certainly didn't stop it.
playwhutyalike @ Oct 26th 2007 9:46AM
Yes, I fell for that once. Transformers: The Game.
Now, I rent before I buy. At least I got 25 for a trade in at ye' old gamestop.
Timo710 @ Oct 25th 2007 3:13PM
I was talking about the first statement people, the one in the blogpost, not reacting to any comment :) .
Rob Accomando @ Oct 25th 2007 3:15PM
Too bad the average consumer has to spend $40-$50 to find out that a game sucks. Then they are either stuck with it or take a loss reselling it.
duerra @ Oct 25th 2007 3:16PM
You know, if the software quality isn't of such a big importance anymore to Nintendo, then why are they still refusing to allow AO-rated games on their platforms? Either open up your platform or don't, but don't sit there and pretend to care only when it suits your interests.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:26PM
Because then they would get shitted on by the public, and besides, no one wants to be the console that allows Rate AO games.
And also keep in mind that many stores simply won't allow the sales of AO games. So there would be no point in allowing an AO game on their console.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:28PM
Because then they would get shitted on by the public, and besides, no one wants to be the console that allows Rate AO games.
And also keep in mind that many stores simply won't allow the sales of AO games. So there would be no point in allowing an AO game on their console.
duerra @ Oct 25th 2007 3:39PM
Vegeta: I understand that they would be the only platform, but I disagree that they would get shit on by the public. They may at first, but after the initial heat dies down, they will be appreciated because of it. Adult content sells, and games would be no different. Movie platforms don't have restrictions on adult content not being allowed, and video games deserve the same rights, and you don't see anybody throwing a fit over that. If you're going to license, then license, but don't pick and choose unless you're going to provide some REAL quality assurance. And by real, I don't mean simply rubber-stamping games that don't contain content that you don't want on your platform, which is essentially what QA has come to on all the platforms.
Rubang B (NDF - Heart) @ Oct 25th 2007 11:58PM
It won't happen unless Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all decide to allow AO games at once, while holding hands. Nobody wants to be the first. The sensationalist media already hates games and blames them for everything from school shootings to global warming. The first console to allow AO games would be eaten alive. Now if Sony just now announced that the PS2 would start to allow AO games, that would be a different story, since that system's slowly dying anyway, and just about to sell pretty well for its last Christmas. But even that would have an anti-Sony backlash and make people confuse the PS2 with the PS3 and call it a porn box or some crap.
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 3:21PM
The "Nintendo Original Seal of Quality" is the symbol used by Nintendo of Europe. Nintendo of America used the "Nintendo Official Seal of Quality" (before removing the "of Quality," which never guaranteed quality games in the first place; look at all the rubbish on NES!). NoE's symbol is a circle, whereas NoA's symbol is an oval.
The NoA symbol originally looked like this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v348/BPMdotEXE/Random/Nin_seal2.jpg
The More You Know!
AstroZombie @ Oct 25th 2007 3:22PM
Didn't Nintendo, at least in part, lose most of its third-party support back in the N64 days because it was being over-zealous with quality control? I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that being an issue.
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 3:30PM
That was part of it. The other part was Nintendo sticking with the restrictive Game Pak format, instead of moving onto CDs.
duerra @ Oct 25th 2007 3:31PM
No, they lost most of that support in the NES/SNES days because of overzealous quality control. However, that overzealousness completely rebuilt the market from the early 80's that was sinking itself because of a flood of crappy titles on the market that cost way too much money.
They lost more 3rd party support on the N64 because of the cost of cartridge media, when the PS and Dreamcast were using the much, MUCH cheaper and higher data storage capacities of disc-based media.
They didn't recover in the GameCube era, largely becaues of over-promises on the power of the PS2 from Sony, causing people to hold out (plus the DVD support). In the end, however, the GameCube turned out to be a more powerful platform, and people were duped. Which to this day remains one of the reasons why I am highly frustrated with Sony and their marketing practices.
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 3:53PM
Nintendo hardly lost support in the NES days. In the NES days, it'd be market suicide to NOT make a game for Nintendo. They knew this, which is why they had a stranglehold on developers: Make a game for us and you can't port it to another system for a couple of years, or make a game for another system and never bring it to us. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Sega's early entry into the 16-bit gave them a bit of an edge against Nintendo, who still didn't have the Super NES ready. Because of this (and maybe other factors, too; I'm not too clear on this), Nintendo was forced to relax their third-party policies. But they still had some control on the content on the platform. See: Mortal Kombat Super NES vs. Genesis. The ridiculously censored Nintendo version was vastly undersold compared to the Sega version. This was what stopped Nintendo from controlling third-parties (Mortal Kombat II was uncensored on Super NES).
But Sony's total freedom of third-party development and using the CD as the game medium is what caused many prolific developers to jump the Nintendo ship. Leaving Nintendo only the scraps, if anything (Square never made a single N64 game, Capcom only had ports of Reisdent Evil 2 and MegaMan Legends, etc.).
Timo710 @ Oct 26th 2007 11:05AM
Then explain superman 64. Ha!
3cubed minus 3squared plus1 @ Oct 25th 2007 3:23PM
I thought the seal was used to stop pirating or something.
If a game had the seal it meant it came from developers.
Oh well, what do I know.
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 3:32PM
The seal just means the publisher has a license from Nintendo.
Even non-licensed games would work on the system, due to reverse engineering of the NES's lock-out chip (see: Tengen's games, Bible Adventures, etc.).
dsub @ Oct 25th 2007 3:27PM
this is EXACTLY why Nintendo needs a Demo service on the Wii, and an online service for the DS. The problem is, how am I supposed to know if game is complete garbage or a worthy purchase before I buy it. In a day and age when a game loses 75% of it's value as soon as it's opened, Nintendo owes it to their customers to at least preview a game before they approve it. I read this article and I was amazed. I, like many remember when the "official seal of quality" from Nintendo usually meant you were getting a good game.
Any look into the Wii's quickly growing collection of quick, once off mini-game compilations shows that this is no longer the case.
Perhaps Nintendo's lack of a quality control program is merely their way of keeping their games as the top-dog on their systems. I guarantee you every Mario, Zelda and Metroid game goes through tons of quality assurance.
Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:33PM
"I, like many remember when the "official seal of quality" from Nintendo usually meant you were getting a good game."
Since when? The official seal of quality simply means that it's a legal copy on a game that is on whatever game that is put on a Nintendo game. Every game had it.
The seal just meant that the game was not glitchy or anything like that. It has nothing to do with whether the game is fun or not.
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 3:42PM
The Seal of Quality meant jack about the quality of the game! All it meant was that the publisher had a license from Nintendo. Want proof?
http://i23.tinypic.com/262xlaq.jpg
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r89/Bildi777/Two-Off%20Pics/587082_49857_front.jpg
http://www.4colorrebellion.com/media/pics/mar/superman64.jpg
It's probably why Nintendo finally wised up and removed the "of Quality" in the GameCube days.
And in case you haven't been paying attention, a demo channel is coming to Wii. As far as I know, though, it'll be used to download DS demos and videos of Wii games (but no playable demos, as far as I know).
megaStryke @ Oct 25th 2007 4:09PM
Back in the day when games could set you back a good $70 or $80 we had to make some decisions on what we wanted to play because there WERE no game demos or rental services. If you wanted to try a game out then you had to find a buddy who owned said game and go to his house. I also distinctly remember that we didn't bitch so much about the games when we were kids. I mean, we enjoyed Disney games like DuckTales and Chip n' Dale! These days, we wouldn't be caught dead playing those kinds of games, but they were simply ACE back in the day!
Another thing, it is much easier these days to sell off games you can't stand anymore and make a nice stack of cash with which to buy even MORE games. Back in the day, you better hope to God that you enjoyed you game (though you typically did) because you were going to be playing that thing year-round just to get your money's worth.
Blast Processing Megadrive @ Oct 25th 2007 4:48PM
Back in the days, though, most Disney games were quality. Capcom did a lot of the 8-bit and 16-bit ones (DuckTales, Chip 'n Dale, Aladdin, etc.). And then there'a Mickey Mania, David Jaffe's first professional project as well as a game from Sony Imagesoft (Sony's former software branch before Sony Computer Entertainment was formed), which was also pretty good.
Exo @ Oct 25th 2007 3:30PM
80% of ps2 games are unplayable, tis just that they made so many that there are enough good ones to make up for the few thousand shitty ones.
the articlt is a joke really, cause every platform has shitty games.
if only the best games were allowed to coem out, there would be like 8 games released a year instead of hundreds
samfish (MSDF- Nurse Outfit!) @ Oct 25th 2007 3:30PM
EVOLUTION?! Joystiq, y'all are lib'rully TOBIASED! Everyone knows evoLUTION t'ain't but th' work a' th' devil!
Miyamoto is GOD and God favors his chosen people which is why third party games don't sell on Nintendo systems!
Spartacus @ Oct 25th 2007 7:38PM
Actually Survival of the Fittest (natural selection) isn't a controversial component of evolution. Though biological macro-evolution is commonly defined by three mechanisms (mutation, natural selection and gentic drift), only mutation is commonly questioned by critics of the theory.
While it is true that macro-evolution is controversial in some circles, natural selection is quite scientificly proven and accepted by both scientists and theologians. Ironically the mechanism is rather anti-evolutionary as its main function is actually eliminating variations rather than propogating them.
Just a little FYI ;-)
dan stabbingworth @ Oct 25th 2007 3:34PM
Feh, tell that to Okami, Psychonauts, etc.