Why I am not that excited with the Wii and Wii Fit sales

[greenmedic88]

hsrob said:

FishyJoe said:
I'll say it again, there is just no pleasing everyone.

If Nintendo implements stricter quality control, there will be endless whining about how Nintendo is turning into the old Nintendo and is trying to control everything.

And that will ruin the industry.

If Nintendo does nothing, there will be endless whining about how low quality software is flooding the market.

And that will ruin the industry.

Nintendo did attempt to enforce stricter quality control at the start of the N64 era and look what happened to them. Third parties just went elsewhere. There are always going to be companies looking to make a quick buck and they will exploit the most popular machine to do so.

Well... there was more than one problem with the N64.

The choice to maintain the cartridge format in particular seems to ring a bell, even ten years later. Developers were not keen on that decision seeing as how they had to cover the costs to produce them before a single unit was sold. Space was the other issue, directly correlated to the cart format. Or rather that lack of it unless publishers wanted to pay a higher publishing premium to cover the additional expense.  

Cheaper optical media along with the additional freedom of storage space it offered seemed the natural state of progression for the industry, but Nintendo went a different direction, largely as a control issue against piracy. For that generation, the decision did not pay off.  

I don't personally think quality control (as in Nintendo being overly draconic about enforcing it) was an issue at all, seeing as how several of the N64 carts I purchased after much anticipation, turned out to be extremely mediocre titles (Castlevania rings a bell).

But yes, developers will always look to dump their quick, mediocre efforts on the platform with the largest user base. That's just the basic economics of the industry.