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Nintendo Improving the Quality of Quality Assurance
Once upon a time it was really hard for a video game to pass through Nintendo’s QA department and receive that big golden “Nintendo Seal of Quality” that guaranteed you were buying something worth playing. Nowadays though, it seems like any crackpot with a half-functioning Flash game can get it onto the DS or Wii – but that may be changing. Word out of Japan is that Nintendo’s QA department is getting an overhaul, which will hopefully lead to a better class of games.
The story was originally reported by Nikkei.net and it’s in Japanese, so take our translation with a grain of salt. What the article appears to be saying is that Nintendo’s QA employees will be receiving a 5% raise, and part-time and temp workers will be converted to full-time positions in order to boost morale. The article also acknowledges that as games become more complex, the need for good QA becomes increasingly important.
Of course these changes aren’t a guarantee that Nintendo will reduce the amount of shovelware that ends up on the DS and the Wii in the future. It will theoretically just be less buggy shovelware. Hopefully though this reassessment of the department means Nintendo is ready to play a more proactive role in what games make it into stores, and that the company finally understands when gamers complain about a drought of good games, it doesn’t mean they want a deluge of bad ones.
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