Sony and Microsoft are spoiling Third Parties to much.

[DonFerrari]

Game_God said:

DonFerrari said:

Game_God said:

I'm well aware of the iron fist policies that Nintendo used back in the day, they were even more ruthless with retail. While I can see that some of their pratices were abusive, you can't argue that the output of quality games was great & that the consumer was more respected than nowadays, where we are treated as beta testers, lied to, micro-transaction dry milked by broken sequel games on release, on top of that we have to pay $300 extra to play these games on-line for a period of 6 years.

Nintendo was ruthless with 3rd parties so that we could enjoy great products, Sony/MS let 3rd parties do whatever & we the consumers pay for the consequences, worse they are steeping up 3rd parties mal-practices: Sony DriveClub & MS Halo: Master Chief Collection comes to mind...

Do customers need Nintendo or anyone else dictating what they can buy??? The games is out there and the customer decides what to buy.

1st of all, sorry to highjack your thread :'P
To answer yout question, ideally no! In reality it's like with drugs, food etc. if there is not someone controlling what is being sold, money/greed makes people do horrible things, there's no such thing as self regulated market, this would only work if every actors had the same power along the line, which clearly they don't.

Nintendo in their good ol' Yamauchi japanese traditional iron fisted way tried to, with positive & negative aspects to it as always. Look at the great IPs born & still remaining under Nintendo great dictatorship ;P

And all of those are regulated by government agency (because of healthy issues) not by the distributers. Comparing games to drugs is quite odd... no hijacking =]

Sony is as japanese as Nintendo and didn't tried so that was more like MS trying to monopolize the market and decide everything their partners can don.

And on the regulatory side I preffer there was none, but I understand the need of the governement to step in from time to time. This really isn't the case.