The quality control is for practical reasons. You can't patch a
cartrige. Blocking small developers has nothing to do with this.

I agree that N having the power to kill games they don't like keeps
perceived quality of the GBA higher. Censorship can be a powerful
tool for many goals, including making money. That's great for
Nintendo, but it sucks for small developers.

They sell the consoles cheap because they are making $$ off the
cartriges, this is true. A profitable business plan is not a
justification for tyranny.

And on another comment - this isn't about freedom of speech? Make a
game called Nintendo Sucks and see if N lets it through. Does N
favor gun control? Make a game that glorifies guns and see if they
allow it. What other social agendas could they push or censor? Any
monopoly like this is strangling freedom in many ways. (even if they
would lose in court)

Adam

--- In gbadev@y..., zxadvance@b... wrote:
> I believe that the sole reason is money. Although the software
released for the GBA is fairly bug free, the quality of the majority
of games released to date is extreemly low.
> I see no evidence of quality control at all.
>
> Chris B.
>
> > Virtually all console producers follow this route ( I know of
none
> > that dont ), it allows a level of quality control completely
unavailable on
> > the pc, one of the reasons that games on the pc dont do so well (
other than
> > quake ), the amount of testing that a game goes through is
immense ( trust
> > me I know ) before approval, how many times has an end user
believed his pc
> > to be broken due to dodgy software, Nintendo dont want users to
think their
> > machines are dodgy due to inadaquately tested software.
> > The real reason for this policy however is money, The
development of
> > a top console is extremely expensive, and they actually sell them
at very
> > low prices when thats taken into consideration, think how much a
small lcd
> > tv is to buy, add in the relevent computational electronics and
you'd be
> > hard pressed to match the gba price, never mind the many millions
that were
> > spent developing/marketing it. In many cases machines have been
sold as loss
> > leaders, similar to the mobile phone market, with companys using
software
> > sales to make up the deficit, and eventually lead them into
profit.