I think a little exposition on how bad third party consideration was before Nintendo even came onto the scene is in order...
When Atari released the 2600, they had the strictest policies on third parties imaginable. Draconian contracts prevented any third party from turning the 2600 into "their" system with various limitations (most ridiculous of all being that the developers of games had to remain unnamed). When competition emerged, a "you support them you lose us" policy similar to Nintendo's emerged. The competition's response was a borderline-illegal move of making 2600 modules for their systems, and the whole contract system Atari had set up fell apart when a judge declared that legal since you could build your own 2600 with off-the-shelf stock parts.
The short of it is, Nintendo's third-party policies in the NES era were downright pleasant compared to what came before. And that third-party policy only matters when your product cannot stand on its own without it. Even with such stringent limitations, the 2600 and NES both outsold everything else as developers knew that success was assured on the most popular (and first-of-its-kind) system.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
