Nintendo uses natural selection for its quality control

While some more pressure from Nintendo on thrid party developres to strive for higher quality is a good thing, I must confess it is hard for me to relate to people who buy games without first investigating them.

The seal of quality was more important before the Internet and, specifically, sites like metacritic.

it will be a head scratcher one day, 1,000 years from now, when some scifi indy jones unearths thoses E.T. carts

it will finally prove that aliens killed the Mayans

What we need is a lot less Natural Gaming Selection and a lot more Intelligent Game Design.

u c wut i did their?

Wow, first Perrin tells us that the reason the USA lacks a Nintendo Club like Japan and Europe has is that it's too big and would cost too much... Now we're told, essentially, 'quality control, schmality control'.

...And here people accuse SONY of being horribly arrogant? I guess like Kaz and others at SCE, Nintendo can always disavow these comments later as being those of a rogue, outgoing voice.

Good play on words.

It's pretty apparent who the older gamers are from the younger ones. I can hardly imagine someone thinking this is an arrogant stance, but I can remember the days when Nintendo was very strict about not only quality, but content. Anyone remember the Mortal Kombat blood fiasco?

In my opinion, this is a smarter Nintendo who's learned something from the Sony model. I don't want a vendor to make decisions for me about what kind of game I play. I often have odd tastes and a game's beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If I see a Nintendo seal on a game, I expect that it's gone through a formal QA process and works correctly with the hardware within the engineering specs...period.

Does that mean we will get some really lousy stuff? Of course, but it also opens up the possibility for true gems to come out of left field. I'm happy to be my own content filter for the games I want to buy, I don't need Nintendo to do it for me.

Actually, the Nintendo seal didn't just mean it wasn't glitchy. When I was developing on the SNES back in the early 90's, there were ALL KINDS of parameters we had to adhere to (including restrictions on blood/gore, etc).

It was a serious pain in the ass to go through the Nintendo approval process. You had to get in the queue in time for Christmas and if you missed the window you were SOL. I guess that's changed.

Personally, I can stand to wade through crap if it means there's more of an opportunity for a small independant dev to put out a real gem. It's easy to do quite a bit of research before I actually purchase a game.

Pretty much every system is like this, there are a ton of crap games (or what is considered crap games by adults), the Wii is only in its first year, and I remember nothing stellar about the DS's first year, but look at it now.

The reality is in America people will buy any game thats on the shelf if their kid points to it and says they want it. Very few people bother to do research before they smack down their hard earned 50$ for the latest video game. Usually kids base what they want off a popular license or popular character so if the industry does not produce games that trigger impulse purchases by children then the industry will lose a significant amount of money. Kids also IMO from what I have seen think just about any game is good, they don't factor in things like price and how long the game is, they just play. They just want games because they are games, and every kid in America loves video games and they love getting a new game no matter what game it is.

Basically my point is there is no need to produce "good" games when America's children are perfectly satisfied by pretty much any pile of crap that is plunked in front of them with a popular licensed character or theme on it as long as its a game and its on the latest system and it has good graphics.

Why produce a truly good game that is more expensive to produce and takes more effort when you can just shove out anything with a popular license on it and it will sell just as well if not better as some other games? After all if you put less time and effort into making a game and it sells equally or better as other games that have had more effort and developer dollars put into them, more money would be going into the pocket of the person who made the less expensive game. This business is all about money, its not about producing a good game or anything, its all about hype and how many games you can sell and how much money the companies make off those games that are sold.

You really know your marketing history people. That Nintendo seal of quality was nothing more than licensees fees, just as buying the cartridges was another Nintendo seal of quality. Tengen fought Nintendo in court for that seal of quality. Nintendo blocking stuff from third parties was another subject not for shitty games but not flooding each month with similar games on the NES...

If these practices were still promoted we wouldn't have games like "BMX XXX", "Pepsiman", "Need For Speed Unleaded $3.47 g.", or the infamous "The Guy Game".

This is a business, remember? you are probably using a pc with an official "Certified for Windows Vista" sticker.

I have that issue.

The article itself sucked HARD.

If anyone remembers correctly (or if they were even around to remember), Nintendo created their approval system for the NES to prevent schlock from Atari's generation coming to the NES. Not every game that went through was spectacular, but it did its job.

Then near the end of the 16-bit generation Nintendo got crapped on for 'having too MUCH' control over other developers' products.

Now Nintendo is minding their own business and they still get crapped on.

EGM themselves were there. Did they care so much about 'teh future of game quality' to look back at their own SNES/N64 reviews to see that Nintendo got some amazing games for their systems? Why's it any different now?

And oh yeah, they quoted a guy from SONY of all companies about how they deal with publishers. I mean, the PS1 and PS2 were the BASTION of quality game development, ESPECIALLY the PS2 in its first year, M I RITE?

Also, I'd like to thank EGM for paying someone to write about crappy games. EGM hates bad games, and yet it's Seanbaby's bread and butter.

This issue also contains damage control in the letter section regarding their Lair hype in contrast with the final product's score.

Way to go EGM. :/

you spoony bard!

i'm old enough to remember when that seal used to mean something.

I read EGM's article and found it pretty ridiculous myself. I do believe Nintendo is partly to blame for the quality of 3rd party titles...partly. However the article seems to shift all of the blame to them.

Perhaps most offensive is the implication that Sony and MS do have strict quality control for 3rd parties when obviously their platforms have tons of worthless games as well. Are the worst games on those systems better than the worst games on the Wii? Is that even worth debating if none of us are going to buy those games?

I want to see 3rd parties pick up the slack on the Wii but there's no way to force them to do so. Does anyone reading this actually believe that games like Bioshock and Orange Box result from MS's and Sony's quality control policies? A publisher either wants to release a quality game or they don't.

One could argue that the platform is popular enough that denying low quality games would force a publisher's hand but obviously the 3rd party sales on the Wii, while better than some think, are still too poor for that strategy to work.

I tend to think that even on the Wii, publishers will realize that poor games tend to have poor sales. Ubisoft seems to have indicated as much and others probably aren't far behind.

Right now I think 3rd parties are just having trouble understanding how to market to Wii owners. They're falling for the whole casual vs hardcore nonsense a bit too severely and are scrambling to figure out how to cash in on the "new market."

"If [publishers] publish for any of the three, if the product does not sell well, it fails on its own."

Well, DUH. That's business.

How many people actually know how the seal of quality works? It's a set of programming and content guidelines, not an official stamp that the game is fun and playable. Any crap game can pass the Seal of Quality.

The only thing is that on other platforms, the certification process is invisible. Nintendo, on the other hand, just makes a big deal out of it.

Also, "spastic".