Everything is controversial
I have been complaining a lot about people claiming that the IGF should cater only to those who actually need the money and recognition associated with the awards rather than simply those who make the best games… This is of course more than a little silly considering how much connection to the IGF I have really had. And to be fair, there are also voices from the other end of the spectrum claiming that games with high production values should beat out all others. Which is what this is about, really, apparently Nintendo recently said it wants games to have a certain level of quality to be released on their consoles. Nothing new about this, really, but apparently it was controversial and Nintendo now tried to smooth things over.
It is more or less the same argument that Hecker and Blow have talked about for so long, how people are reluctant to explore ideas to any depth. Nintendo approaches the subject from a business standpoint of wanting to provide quality to the players rather than a playground for the developers – arguably a poor excuse for a console with that much shovelware, but still a sound idea. And that is not even what they are arguing about, the whole idea of Nintendo being more elitist about who they work with is fiction – neither Sony nor Microsoft will support and send devkits to a studio that does not have office space with proper security.
That is not to say I dislike hobbyist development. Some of the best games I have played have come from one-man teams and there is always tremendous fun to find in people’s experiments. I do hobby development myself – but there is a difference to making a small game about something simple and a full game that explores multiple ideas to a deep level and manages to balance the design. Both can be good games, but they are different enough that a platform can reasonable choose to provide one but not the other.