Shadow1980 said:
And they may have been rightfully paranoid given the circumstances that led to the Crash of '83. An oversaturated console market flooded with (usually very shoddy) third-party software stemming from Atari's inability to control who published for the VCS/2600 was perhaps the biggest contributor to that, and Nintendo was obviously well aware of that fact, entering the console market right when it started to implode in North America (which essentially was the console market at the time). I can very much see why Nintendo might have wanted tight controls on who was allowed to develop for their system and how many games they could make. While they may have gone overboard, they were rightfully concerned that there was a need to avoid a repeat of the mistakes that led the console market to crash in 1983. |
Once Atari lost its suit to keep Activision from developing games for the 2600, the floodgates opened for all kinds of shovelware, including shit like Custer's Revenge. Nintendo was well aware of the market conditions that led to the 1983 crash. They had to reckon with them in order to get the NES out in the US. A lot of retailers flat-out refused to stock video games at all. Even the way the NES was designed played into this. The box we got with the weird spring-loaded cartridge slot and the huge, boxy cartridges were an attempt to evoke a VCR and video cassettes. R. O. B. was thrown in to tap into a fascination with robots people had at the time. Nintendo had to do all this, and I would imagine some financial incentives, just to convince retailers to stock the NES. From the NES on, almost every platform has had some form of curation for its titles to ensure console makers would see a ROI and make it tougher for companies to tarnish their reputations by releasing shovelware and bad pornographic games. Even Steam used to have a degree of curation.
