Some people, such as a PlayStation fan on Slashdot who will remain nameless, would argue that a barrier to entry is a good thing. It ensures that anybody who wants to distribute software to the public is serious about creating quality software. It's a fallacy, but like other fallacies,
appeal to accomplishment springs from a heuristic: companies that have successfully published quality works in the past are more likely to publish quality works in the future. The example he likes to trot out is the North American video game recession of 1983, when there was so much shovelware crap on store shelves that neither players nor retailers could find which 2600 games were worthwhile. The North American market pretty much abandoned video games until the fourth quarter of 1985 when Nintendo added a lockout chip to its new Nintendo Entertainment System to assure retailers that only games that Nintendo had evaluated for a certain baseline quality level would be allowed to run.