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Forums - Nintendo - Which Nintendo system has had the worst quality control?

Depends, the quality control is often inversely proportionate to popularity of the console. The higher the console the more common the shovel-ware ergo the lower the perceived control of quality. This isn't a problem then since the console itself may be quality and it may have a ton of quality first and second quality games in addition to some great 3rd party titles that only look small when compared to the mountain of 3rd party crap.

So the true winner would have to be a console that generally fails at all of it. That'd have to go to the virtua boy. As a person who actually played Mario Tennis back in the day, they failed to deliver on every aspect of a console. They even decided to forgo developing a console with full color because they didn't want to make the investment. I honestly don't even know why they released it if not to dump the development costs on their most trusting fans.



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The wii fits that perfectly.



ExplodingBlock said:
 Gamecube had the best quality control imo

The quality control being that not very many people bought it so only Nintendo made games for it?



NintendoPie said:
ExplodingBlock said:
 Gamecube had the best quality control imo

The quality control being that not very many people bought it so only Nintendo made games for it?


Huhh? The GameCube had pretty strong second and third party support. Almost every multiplatform game was released for the GC too. The N64 and Wii U had/has worse 3rd party support.



dam4rus said:

Huhh? The GameCube had pretty strong second and third party support. Almost every multiplatform game was released for the GC too. The N64 and Wii U had/has worse 3rd party support.

The GameCube still had very weak support overall. When comparing it to the DS and Wii, which everyone is saying had the worst quality control, it's like nothing. Although many of the games on Wii/DS seem like crap to us, the Wii/DS served an insanely broad scope of players, something the GameCube couldn't do.



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NintendoPie said:
ExplodingBlock said:
 Gamecube had the best quality control imo

The quality control being that not very many people bought it so only Nintendo made games for it?

Popularity doesn't really have anything to do with quality control. If you put out the perfect console and only one game that was also perfect you could have absolute perfect quality control that no one wants to buy. Quality is not quantity.



Skullwaker said:
KLXVER said:
Skullwaker said:
I'd say it's between NES, Wii and DS. NES was basically the foundation of gaming and not many developers knew how to make quality games so they just made them hard and awkward to artificially lengthen them. The Wii and DS sold like hotcakes so they got a ton of shovelware.


Nintendo had pretty strict rules about games on the NES. Publishers were only allowed to release 5 games a year on it.

 

I would say the Wii. So many horrible cash-ins...

Wow, really? They've come a long way from that, though they certainly have room to improve.

What a lot of people don't realize though is that Nintendo's relationship with 3rd parties in the 3rd generation might seem barbaric now, it was actually revolutionary at its time and one of the major factors that allowed them to revive the industry that Atari destroyed.




8th gen predictions. (made early 2014)
PS4: 60-65m
WiiU: 30-35m
X1: 30-35m
3DS: 80-85m
PSV: 15-20m

I think I'll go with the DS, if DSiWare counts towards that.

It doesn't have much to do with quality control. It's more about how easy third parties think it will be to exploit the user base for easy profits. Nintendo hasn't been very 'controlling' for a long time, and even back then it's not like bad games didn't get released.



I'd go with the Wii.

The NES was home to some bad games, but many of the worse ones only appeared on the NES later in its life after it largely monopolized the market and Nintendo had secured a reputation for quality. The Game Boy accumulated a fair number of worse games, but that was largely due to its longevity as opposed to bad control, and it's worth noting that it even took Nintendo a while to make handheld games really worthwhile (many earlier games were inferior versions of NES games).

More recently, the DS had a lot of low-quality games, but considering the sheer size of its library (over 2000 licensed games), there were not THAT many terrible titles, especially when you consider that some of the worst DS games were licensed titles released on every platform under the sun.

Most recently, the Wii U has had some pretty awful things like Meme Run and the Letter, but on the retail side of things, trash without the word "Sonic" in the title stopped being released shortly after launch. Digital-only games include those terrible titles, but considering how Nintendo is currently making relatively large strides in the console digital market, these mistakes are more than outweighed. For example, the Wii U eShop got Shovel Knight, Guacamelee, Child of Light, Telsagrad, 1001 Spikes, SteamWorld Dig, and Stealth Inc 2 from outside developers in 2014 alone. Besides, it's not as if other platforms had no terrible games this year. The only reason we remember Sonic Boom instead of the Rambo game, Yaiba Ninja Gaiden Z, Escape Dead Island, and Soul Calibur: Lost Swords is that Sonic always attracts more hype. And if you want digital disasters, check out every other product released on Steam this past year.

The Wii is different. It was seemingly built on the assumption that few would make high quality games for it, which was a bad way to start. But even after it became popular, the initially low standards were never high enough to keep hundreds of shovelware titles from coming out, to the point where both buyers and even dedicated gamers and reviewers could not keep track of what might or might not be good. Unlike the DS though, few skilled developers outside of Nintendo ever made much for the system, which reinforced the notion that the Wii had no quality games aside from Nintendo's, leading to consumer apathy, and eventually bad sales for what good games did eventually come out.

I think that this is one reason why games like Little King's Story, No More Heroes 2, Red Steel 2, and some multiplatform games from about 2009 onwards had poor sales despite good reviews and the Wii's installbase and general popularity into 2011. Of course, the fact that many of the Wii's games were more niche than their HD counterparts (was MadWorld ever going to outsell God of War?) didn't help either.

Oh, and WiiWare didn't work out. It came out over a year later than preferable, had to compete with a healthy Virtual Console. At this point, the VC in North America already had over 200 games, which probably was a bit to compete with. The Wii's storage limitations were also a big problem. Even after SD Cards became an option, 40 MB is less than preferable to many developers. On the 360, Super Meat Boy, Limbo and Minecraft were in the 100 to 125 MB range, Castle Crashers was 140 MB, The Walking Dead is over 400 MB.



Wii!!!!!!



Jonathan