Nintendo once ruled gaming with an iron fist. Sure, for the most part, the methods behind them gaining and keeping all that power were mostly illegal but why get trivial. There were a few things they did back in the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System days that I actually think were good actions on their part. My question is, should they bring these business practices back?
The first business practice that made a lot of sense to me only recently in life was the whole "quality control" process they would put third party games through prior to giving them the green light to be released to fans. Part of this control involved a scoring system, if the game scored extremely well, it did not count towards the yearly number of games that third party developer could release.
The idea was pretty simple. Nintendo just wanted to make sure that we did not see more games like E.T. or Pac-Man released into the NES gaming sphere and ruin a good thing they had going. After all, gamers trusted Nintendo to do better than Atari did.
We all know this was something that caused many a gamer headache after seeing some great games in magazines back then, only to eventually realize that those cool games were never going to be released for whatever reason. Of course, had Nintendo not been controlling the number of games a third party developer could release, and worse still if that game did not meet the minimum requirements Nintendo set, it simply did not get released. Considering most third parties did not have the money of Nintendo or Capcom or Konami, they could not go back and retool large portions of the game to make it meet Nintendo's quality requirements so a lot of games were simply lost.
Whether that is a good thing or not is something only history, and some lucky prototype ROM owners, can tell us.
I personally think this would be a good business practice to bring back. Why? Just look at the Wii. While there are some great games on that platform, even the most die-hard fan has to admit that there is a lot of crap on it as well.
Gaming today has become what the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer was trying to do back in the early 90's - literally anyone that could produce something that fit on a CD-ROM and could afford the packaging and production of the retail product could make games. Much like the PC market. There was no real quality control going on. That is what we have now but it is much worse than just one console and the PC Master Race. From Android and iPhone to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, there seems to be no real quality control in place beyond whatever each company implements.
That can be bad. Very bad.
This is an area that I think Nintendo could stand tall in and actually bring in more support from gamers. If there was a quality control process in place for the Switch and Nintendo 3DS with a more controlled release of games I think it would benefit gamers more, as well as game publishers.
Why? Because if game publishers know they have to compete for the right to reach the millions of fans that own a 3DS or Nintendo Switch then I think the quality of games will rise on its own.
Then there is that little gold seal...
That brings me to the Nintendo Seal of Quality. Both Sega and NEC tried their own versions of this with varying degrees of success. Obviously their seals didn't mean as much as Nintendo's due to fan recognition and parents trust in Nintendo. Didn't stop them from trying though.
If the Nintendo Seal of Quality returned, I think it would help Nintendo stand out a bit on the shelves against Sony and Microsoft. It would be a selling point again - "Our games carry the Nintendo Seal of Quality and theirs don't." type slogans or ad sound bites are easy to get into the heads of parents. We saw how well this worked in the NES days.
Am I crazy? Who knows but let let me know your opinion below.