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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

> 1. The Nintendo Seal of Quality: Ron Judy had the novel idea of mandating that all games pass a stringent series of tests to be deemed Nintendo-worthy, ensuring high-caliber product and making software developers beholden to Nintendo’s approval.

See this is what apple should be doing in an open app store.

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It's worth noting that the quality of games currently released on the Nintendo Switch is currently pretty abysmal[1], with as many Unity asset flips and low-effort 'games' as on Steam.

Perhaps it's not as bad as the situation on mobile, but a quick look through the recently released list on the eShop shows how bad things have gotten.

[1] https://kotaku.com/fans-are-pissed-about-the-switch-eshop-s-...

Yeah the scale of shovelware and even broken games is really bad.

There's a lot of rose-colored glasses about how Nintendo has been auditing games in recent history.

There was a lot of crapware on the DS and Wii as well. My Stop Smoking Coach was a real DS title.

It's what Apple is already doing. The Nintendo situation was: either your game gets the Nintendo Seal of Quality, or it doesn't get published at all. The Seal of Quality was much more an exclusive gateway of access to the platform and a censorship device (to prevent repeats of the Custer's Revenge situation) than it was an assurance of quality: if you watched AVGN videos you'd know there were plenty of shitty NES games. Nintendo also capped the number of published games per third party and insisted on manufacturing all the carts. Some underground publishers found ways around the NES lockout, but to do so would be to invite lawsuits from Nintendo (and would be a felony under today's DMCA).

This is absolutely true. If anyone remembers Tengen back in the day putting stuff out without the Nintendo seal of approval; Nintendo completely freaked out about it despite the fact that Tengen’s stuff was much higher quality than many “approved” Nintendo games.

Tengen started out as a licensee. They released three games as licensees (Pac-Man, RBI Baseball, and Gauntlet). They were also simultaneously cracking 10NES. Worried about damage to consoles, they went to the Copyright Office and falsely represented themselves as potentially entering into litigation with Nintendo, and obtained the 10NES program (which is honestly probably where they screwed up). They started releasing the famous black unlicensed carts, and proceeded to get sued.

>Nintendo also capped the number of published games per third party

They also allowed said third parties to get around this via shell companies, if they were popular enough. See: Konami and Ultra Games

It is a kids game to publish something on Apple's store versus on Nintendo.

> 1. The Nintendo Seal of Quality...

But they allowed LJN to publish:

https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/LJN

Yeah, and then Apple’s review throughput drops through the floor, leaving only “big names” at the top of the priority list and indie developers can pound sand.

Don't only "big names" make it though to pop on the app store anyway.

They essentially have the best of both worlds. Anyone can publish their niche app, to a niche audience.

But only Apple decides what hundreds of millions of people will be exposed to.

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