some people forget, or don't know about, Atari's first consoles, which had zero "secure" features and the enormous mess that caused. the entire home video game industry in the US virtually died for a while because of all the crap games that were produced. imagine mobile-like shovelware games selling for $60 each for a while, and consumers being unable to tell which games were good and which were bad until you took them home and played them. then, finding out you can't return the crap ones because too many other people were returning those same games, and the retailers couldn't absorb the cost.
then, seeing all console video games in "bargain bins" for $1-$2 each and even then extremely few people were buying them. I recall seeing bins going virtually untouched for months.
parents just stopped buying games for their kids' consoles, nearly completely. the idea of a home video game console was so negative that Nintendo needed to call the NES an Entertainment System in order to get their device into homes. That Nintendo Seal of Quality really meant something, and only Nintendo could manufacture the lockout chip that prevented unauthorized games from running, so that Seal of Quality really had weight and it basically meant "no shovelware games" for it's entire existence.
Entrepreneurs showed Nintendo and Atari what happens when you have no console security: that lots and lots of people will eagerly crush the entire market in exchange for a bit of money. Nintendo has not forgotten this lesson, and they're not likely to.
How does hardware/software security solve this? Is this not just a certification issue? If Atari had officially blessed games and told retailers which games were good, would that not have solved the issue? I guess securing the device to not load unauthorised games is a solution, but isn’t just certifying games and publishing information about the good ones enough? I guess distributing information widely was a lot harder back then.
If the reason for people buying shovelware is that they need to go home and try it to see if it’s bad, wouldn’t a simple blank CD packaged as a game achieve the same thing?
do you really think that game publishers would simply obey orders from a console manufacturer who told them to "only make good games"? game publishers take every shortcut possible when publishing games, including (but not limited to) strongarming the developers, lying via box art and/or wording on packaging, and so on. game publishers optimize for profit, not game quality.
even with the NES CIC chip keeping most unauthorized games from working, Atari successfully duplicated the functionality of the chip and published their own games under the "Tengen" brand. Nintendo was very unhappy about this, and while Nintendo won in court, they learned their lesson and doubled-down on console protections from then on.
Nintendo are unlikely to ever forget the lesson that this court case taught them.
So, with that, even with the presence of technological measures to keep non-nintendo-made carts out of the NES, there were still non-nintendo games running inside NES consoles.
things like this are why Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are so dedicated to locking the consoles down and doing everything they can to prevent unauthorized access. Nintendo has been shown multiple times that companies will just do whatever they want unless there are strong lockdown features to the hardware.
others have learned from Nintendo's experience, as well, and that's why we are where we are today. we will not be returning to the early days of video game consoles, where hardware was unprotected.
That’s fair. Nintendo can’t make the game publishers do anything in an open ecosystem. What they can do is maintain a list of good game publishers and encourage people to buy from that list. Again, arguably easier to do now with say the Nintendo website, then back before high availability of internet.
From Nintendo’s perspective, locked hardware makes sense. They risk being locked out of profits from other publishers.
However, I’m not convinced that’s the case from a consumer perspective. The reason you gave in the original comment was that consumers suffered from the open platform. I still disagree with that. Consumers suffered because the platform was open AND there was no trusted source for quality control. You don’t have to take away 1) for consumers to not accidentally get terrible games, you just have to have a trusted source which tells consumers which games are good so that 2) isn’t the case. As soon as consumers know they can buy good games directly from Nintendo (or from blessed retailers), the onus for running crapware is on them.
well if you can find a way to control quality while letting anyone who owns your hardware to do as they please, I would encourage you to share that info, in detail, with the world, because no one else has figured that out, yet.
Nintendo won't even sell development kits for the Switch to just anyone. you have to have a "good enough" game pitch (with no published rules on what is good enough and what is not) and you must commit to actually producing the game before they will even let you SEE the development kit and related items in the developer account store.
of course you can buy dev kits for the Wii U and 3DS, the discontinued systems, but you can't produce software that runs on the retail hardware, even for those.
Have you heard of Steam? PC is open hardware. There is a minimum bar of quality. Steam controls which games you can buy through it. Very profitable too.
Steam theoretically can control quality as much as they want. The bar they choose is entirely arbitrary and completely upto them.
then, seeing all console video games in "bargain bins" for $1-$2 each and even then extremely few people were buying them. I recall seeing bins going virtually untouched for months.
parents just stopped buying games for their kids' consoles, nearly completely. the idea of a home video game console was so negative that Nintendo needed to call the NES an Entertainment System in order to get their device into homes. That Nintendo Seal of Quality really meant something, and only Nintendo could manufacture the lockout chip that prevented unauthorized games from running, so that Seal of Quality really had weight and it basically meant "no shovelware games" for it's entire existence.
Entrepreneurs showed Nintendo and Atari what happens when you have no console security: that lots and lots of people will eagerly crush the entire market in exchange for a bit of money. Nintendo has not forgotten this lesson, and they're not likely to.