They also had a gargantuan library of games for every single console they had produced that just didn't work. Everyone likes to rag on Nintendo for Silver Surfer, or that one Superman game for being unplayable, but Sega had so many of those unplayable games that no one remembers their names. Sega wasn't known for quality after the console wars. They were known for having much cheaper games than Nintendo. I remember looking at the cartridges in the store, and Sega had a huge selection compared to Nintendo, and those cartridges were in the $45-$50 range brand new. Nintendo had about ½ to ⅓ the selection of titles, and they ran $50-$70 per game, but you knew you were getting good games 99% of the time, especially if you had a subscription to one of the various gaming magazines. PlayStation was Nintendo's first real competition, and the PS1 was just eating Nintendo for breakfast.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago

You could say the same thing of the NES. The crash of '83 had as much to do with the mountains of shovelware on the market for the early consoles and microcomputers that might not even load and run. You got a lot of knockoffs, branded merchandise, and other low effort crap the programmer didn't actually give a shit about flooding the market, which inflated the bubble, then it burst.

A large part of Nintendo's strategy for entering a crashed market was to address this with their Seal Of Quality. Using anything from the design patent of the cartridge shell to security chips, they enforced a monopoly on manufacturing cartridges for their systems; Nintendo was the only manufacturer of Nintendo cartridges. And their Seal Of Quality meant they had inspected the game and made sure it is functional software, that it loads and runs without crashing. They don't guarantee the game is fun, which is why Superman 64 was allowed to be published. It's a garbage game but it doesn't crash an N64.

Other platforms aren't as strict with their libraries, which means there's more and cheaper games out there for it. The extreme example is Steam on PC, where their algorithm is "publish whatever is submitted and pull it down if someone raises a legitimate complaint." There's a lot of great games on Steam, there's a lot of Unity tutorial projects on Steam. Their excellent refund policies make this acceptable.