> Nintendo addressed this by strictly limiting the number of releases, as well as having a thorough pre-release review process. Atari couldn't do that, since there was no way to police it, and anyway they wanted to shovel out crap themselves.
This is only true of Nintendo outside of Japan, and pretends that both Nintendo and Atari had some aversion to shipping crap games. Atari being able to limit third parties wouldn't have stopped ET, and Nintendo of America still published their own sweet of terrible games.
Since the crash mostly affected the US (see all the Europeans wondering what the crash was), that Nintendo reviewed games only for the US/Europe is appropriate.
Also I'm not sure you read my whole comment -- anyway they wanted to shovel out crap themselves, refers to Atari shipping lots of crap games.
I don't think Nintendo released that many crap games to the US, and they also didn't realease too many, 17 at launch in 1985, 10 in 1986, 9 in 1987, and then fewer per year after that. Atari released 22 games in 1982, in addition to the flood of third party titles that were released that year.
>Since the crash mostly affected the US (see all the Europeans wondering what the crash was), that Nintendo reviewed games only for the US/Europe is appropriate.
So your explanation of how Nintendo fixed this problem was only important in half of their market, and Europe wasn't even facing the problem that they fixed.
Nintendo may have put out crap games, but there were a LOT of crap games that Atari themselves put out that were way worse. We're talking about a company that actually thought making first-party video game version of a Rubik's cube was a good idea.
Games for the Nintendo Gameboy through to the last of DS line were a minefield of shovelware. There were a large number of really great games but they were still a drop in an ocean of crap. The jury is still out on the Switch.
This is only true of Nintendo outside of Japan, and pretends that both Nintendo and Atari had some aversion to shipping crap games. Atari being able to limit third parties wouldn't have stopped ET, and Nintendo of America still published their own sweet of terrible games.