Re:The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an indu...
by jdietrich on Monday July 02, 2018 @06:15AM
(#17440521)
I think Nintendo's quality control gets too much credit. The European market was flooded with C64 and Spectrum games of wildly varying quality, but a) they were cheap and b) there were credible, independent games magazines. The European computer games market in the mid-80s wasn't too dissimilar from the PC games market of the mid-90s.
A full-price Spectrum or Commodore title cost £8-£10 ($30-$40 in today's money), but a budget title cost as little as £2 ($7.50). The low cost of cassette media drove down the price of games, so young gamers could build a collection with their pocket money.
Crash, Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 weren't afraid to slate a bad game, so you could have a reasonable degree of trust in their reviews. Your Sinclair had a regular feature called Crap Games Corner, dedicated to taking the mickey out of genuinely awful games. By the late 80s, all the major magazines had cover tapes with demos or free games.
Nintendo's strict quality control was a particular response to the severe asymmetry of information in the US console games market, but it wasn't the only option.
A full-price Spectrum or Commodore title cost £8-£10 ($30-$40 in today's money), but a budget title cost as little as £2 ($7.50). The low cost of cassette media drove down the price of games, so young gamers could build a collection with their pocket money.
Crash, Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 weren't afraid to slate a bad game, so you could have a reasonable degree of trust in their reviews. Your Sinclair had a regular feature called Crap Games Corner, dedicated to taking the mickey out of genuinely awful games. By the late 80s, all the major magazines had cover tapes with demos or free games.
Nintendo's strict quality control was a particular response to the severe asymmetry of information in the US console games market, but it wasn't the only option.