More thoughts on Wii 3rd party sales...

[The Ghost of RubangB]

theRepublic said:

Gamerace said:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. It's too hard for Betty the Wii owner to know what is a good game and what's crap so she sticks to what she knows - Mario, Resident Evil, Star Wars, Sims, etc.

A good answer to that is for Nintendo or a 3rd party alliance to make a 'gold seal' of quality where games either pre-judged by Nintendo or better an alliance of 3rd parties and those found of high enough quality get the seal. Alternatively critically acclaimed games get rereleased as part of a 'platinum' or whatever series.

Before someone argues that'd never happen - it could, the wine industry in Ontario got together to do exactly that. An alliance of independant wineries judge each other's wines and those that meet certain standards get the seal. This helped the Ontario Wineries alot because the public now felt confident in what they were getting (either good or cheap).

That sounds an awful lot like the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" that is generally credited with getting third parties pissed off at Nintendo and causing them to bolt for Sony and the original Playstation.  For that reason, I'm not sure that Nintendo or third parties would go for something like that.

Re-releasing critically acclaimed games or million sellers as "player's choice" or "platinum" is a more realistic option in my opinion.  It would probably go over better for all parties if the games had already proved themselves instead of being released with a seal.

 

The old Seal of Quality was a mixed blessing.  It did kinda help to save the industry, since the Atari would allow every piece of crap in the world to be released, and Nintendo's strict quality control cut most of the crap out.  And then they kept their super tight grip of quality control for years until there were finally serious competitors and it was too expensive to make crappy games, so the Seal was irrelevant and it hurt them.  But at first it was a huge benefit.

No console company can afford to ever do that again though.