Comment by DanielleMolloy

I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control (i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years, when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release, we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system.

Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples: PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market.

R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.