Chase in point. This is a third party publisher problem. It has nothing to do with the console makers. Customers need to speak with their wallets and downvote the companies with their wallets. Its as simple as that. 

I completly agree with that statement, in the end, the responsability belongs to whoever is making the games! They make it, they have to stand behind it!

But then again, hardware makers aren't certainly helping much stopping from it happening, in certain cases one could certainly consider that some window releases were pressured on them, but in the end 3rd parties are their own masters & it's up to them to make good finished games!

Well, Nintendo also approved Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag and Virtue's Last Reward on 3DS with its save game problems and some other third party games with disappointing performance or other problems.

Without the capability to fix retail games with online patches, games on former consoles or handhelds HAD to be 99% bug-free. Unfortunately, ALL console makers got more lenient in their approval process the last years, not only Sony and Microsoft.

lol, sadly true ;P

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

MS does the same for digital games and I'm sure Sony does it as well.

Physically, I think there is no such thing.

I both worked in the 3D scene & gaming retail business, you would be surprised at how much I indeed know of what happens behinds the scenes, from Sony it's down right shocking the words they use to describe their consumers...  cattle being shown their way to the slaughterhouse comes to mind!

Interesting...I see the drawbacks with implementing a system that checks retail games, but with the recent struggles, I wouldn't exactly object to it. 

That's probably for the best.

What's the alternative? 1st parties having all the influence thus killing competition?

That's not even close to being comparable. If someone puts some addictive chemical in your food, the only way for consumers to know that is if someone with the necessary expensive equipment analyzes it. If a game is buggy, you can hear about it from a reviewer prior to release (unless there's a review embargo) or from any of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who chose to buy the game day-1. If it has DLC and/or microtransactions, you usually hear about it from the publishers themselves before release.