Nintendo's seal of quality approval was a trademark Nintendo have used during the company's startup with the NES. A lot of people went nuts and people complained when nintendo decided to remove the word "quality" from their seal. It's understanding why people would be upset because there is no longer quality in the product since the word has been removed. However, I believe there is more to the reasoning as to why Nintendo removed the word "quality" from their seal.
With the NES, America was in a video game crash. Consumers didn't have any faith from video game makers since most of the games being released by them were seen as mediocre or simply just bad. Everyone talks about the Atari 2600 ET game as a prime example and it holds true to it's value. Because of this situation, Nintendo had to create a system of enforcement to gain the confidence of the consumer and to watch the development process of the game makers. This was the reason why Nintendo created the seal. The seal meant that consumers can have confidence in the product as the company has reviewed the game for quality consistancies with their approval standard.
However, fast forward to the 5th generation of Nintendo home consoles with the Wii, Nintendo decides to remove the word "quality" from their seal. Does it make a difference?! NO!
It no longer makes a difference because the environment has changed. The gaming world is no longer in a crash and Nintendo no longer has to watch over the third party companies. So who watches over the third party developers?! Quality will be determined by the third party themselves. Every company that makes a game will be under their own demise for creating games that are below to consumers expectations. Even Nintendo makes bad games and they lose big.
So what made Nintendo follow this direction after so many console releases?! The other console companies.
If you look at the other console companies, Sony and Microsoft, Sega is not included because they are no longer a console maker, they do not provide any form of quality assurance for their games. If you look at the library size of the playstation 2 and xbox, they both have a substantial amount of games and none of the console companies provide "quality". Not only did the other console company not provided any "quality", the third party companies were taking full responsibility for making bad games. If capcom made a bad game, capcom didn't blame Sony nor the consumers of the playstation 2 system. So if Sony and Microsoft didn't have "quality" in their seal and third party companies were understandable for their action, you follow suit, which explains why "quality" is removed from Nintendo's seal.
In the end, what does this mean? A lot of complaints! But to who?
A lot of people will tell you that there are a lot of garbage games on the wii. Who is to blame for that?! Many would say Nintendo as they are the one who is responsible for quality that is being released on their console. However, the reality is that the third party developers are the ones who are responsible. A good example is Okami made by Capcom. The game was a big flop on the playstation 2 and was remade for the wii, which had little results. The difference is that the wii had a harsher complaint than the playstation 2. Capcom would blame Nintendo consumers as they were labeled "casual", which meant incompetent gamers. But how can a company make such claims to similar consumers on a previous console as the playstation 2?!
