Much has been made of how video games may be recession proof, enjoying strong sales during the 2008 holiday season. Much of that, perhaps 99% of it was due to Nintendo’s Wii continuing to rack up big sales and in the process pull millions of so called casual gamers into the market.
Nintendo’s strong sales are great for Nintendo and the industry in general. But the Wii has also been accused of being the home of a lot of low quality games made to piggy back on the console’s success but sans any innovative gameplay to take true advantage of the motion sensitive controller. This should alarm anyone who remembers the last time a wildly popular games console became home to lots of crapware. That console was the Atari 2600 and the over abundance of bad games lead to the video games crash of the 1980s.
Atari never fully recovered from the disaster, and it is a bit ironic that Nintendo, the company that would replace Atari and essentially recreate the video games industry is in danger replaying that history. A lot of new gamers have come into the market thanks to Nintendo. Now Nintendo should do everyone a favor and stop approving every 3rd party game under the sun. Nintendo 1st party titles have been nothing but stellar, but a flood of crappy 3rd party games will kill them just as surely as they killed Atari.