They simply brought back the
in disguise, exploiting the greed of the third parties to ensure Nintendo's first party games and lazy upgrades would get all the physical sales.
For people who don't know the story, back then on NES, Nintendo would limit the games to 5 per year per publisher to keep control over the market. As they were manufacturing the cartridges themselves, they had total control over the releases... and some publishers like Konami had to create other trademarks to release more games.