I do wish Nintendo was a bit pickier about clearing games for sale on the Switch. On the estore specifically there’s a lot of low quality shovelware.
I find myself a lot more nuanced about walled gardens sometimes.
But an app store doesn't have the limitation of inventory. No number of low-cost games will impair the ability to sell the premium titles. Not needing to worry about dilution, the store operator reverts to rent-seeking behavior and will approve the most number of games as they can. Or will create artificial scarcity by restricting access to popular titles.
When buying physical media, licensing balances the needs of the publisher, producer, and customer. But in the digital world there's almost no overlap.
I think they do in a different way. An expensive phone game is $5. Every once in a while a game will try to break that mold and they get mocked.
Edit: And by high budget games I mean games with a high development budget, not games that costs a lot to buy. Genshin impact is a AAA game that runs on phones, they invested $100 million to make it, that is what I meant by it being a high budget game.
It's not totally unheard of. Among Us is paid on PC/console but free on mobile. PUBG was similar before it went free to play on all platforms earlier this year.
I’m the early days of smart phone gaming there was a brief push for immersive 3D games like Deadspace. The games were good but not enough people were willing to pay for it when gamers generally already had better devices for gaming on.
Backtrack a few more years, before ads were prevalent on phones, and you had a massive library of Java based games for feature phones plus Windows CE / PocketPC ports of popular PC games (like Tomb Raider). In fact this market appeared to be growing so much that Nokia released a phone/ console hybrid device (the Nokia N-Gage).
So there was a culture of bringing quality titles to mobile phones and PDA but the economics wasn’t there.
Netflix also has unlimited inventory space and they spend tons of engineering effort in optimizing the content they show people when they launch the app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_II_(NES_video_gam...
I am sure I shoveled a lot of garbage that I rented at the video rental store that was inside the grocery store into my NES, but that one just stood out.
Getting the keys to your device's walled garden does not imply you're compelled to leave that garden. You can stick to the official store, that contains only high-quality games blessed and vetted by Nintendo.
This hasn’t changed much since the NES days.
That AVGN made his career reviewing - to start - shitty NES games, indicates that the ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’, or it’s ‘curation’ - really didn’t matter much.
And it’s not like the NES was alone, even more recently, the Wii was the literal king of shovelware - if you haven’t heard the story of ‘Gingerbread Ninja’ and it’s related clones hilariously sold as different titles, you should check it out.
It’s always been this way. The walls of ‘Walled Gardens’ don’t seem to really hold up to any potential scammer with a ladder. The iOS App Store is filled with scammy garbage copies of legit apps.