Alternate history: N64 goes with CDs instead of cartridges

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

DonFerrari said:

Except we have the very big evidence that even during SNES era they lost a lot of exclusiviness and some even jumped ship to Genesis. So it isn't far fetched to imagine that Nintendo would still have lost majorly even with CD. Just look how much fuck they gave to third parties in N64, GC and Wii.

We keep pretending Nintendo sole mistake was to chose a format while Sega made a lot of mistakes and Sony was dumb luck, but that is being reducionist.

Actually, Nintendo did not lose a ton of support to Sega. Arguably the four biggest third parties of the late 80s/early 90s were Capcom, Konami, Square, and Enix. The latter two stuck exclusively with Sega, with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest remaining the most popular third-party IPs in the Japanese market (and the former having decent popularity in America as well). Capcom and Konami did support Sega, but they had more games exclusive to the SNES than to the Genesis.

Capcom's support of the Genesis was rather token, with ports of Street Fighter II as well as a 16-bit remastered collection of the first three NES Mega Man games, and there was also a Genesis port of the Ghouls & Ghosts arcade game released in 1989, but was developed in-house by Sega under license from Capcom. Meanwhile, Capcom released UN Squadron, Final Fight 1-3, Super Ghouls & Ghosts, Mega Man X 1-3, Mega Man 7, Breath of Fire, The Magical Quest starring Mickey Mouse, Demon's Crest, and X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse (among other lower-profile games) exclusively for the SNES.

Konami's support of the Genesis was somewhat better, but still not as good as their support of the SNES. They released Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Tiny Toon Adventures, and Animaniacs for the Genesis, but those games had SNES ports as well. They made TMNT: The Hyperstone Heist, but that was very similar to the SNES Turtles in Time game, sharing the same basic gameplay and many of the same levels. As for actual total exclusives, they released Contra Hard Corps and Castlevania Bloodlines late in the generation, and Rocket Knight Adventures and its sequel Sparkster, though in regards to the latter they did release a Sparkster game for the SNES, too (though it was largely a different game). Meanwhile, they released Gradius III, Castlevania IV, Contra III, the Ganbare Goemon/Legend of the Mystical Ninja games, a Batman Returns game (there was a Genesis version, but it was a first-party Sega title), Axelay, and a few Japan-only titles exclusively for the SNES.

So, the major Japanese third parties weren't exactly chomping at the bit to flee Nintendo in the 16-bit era.

What about Western publishers?

Electronic Arts, Acclaim, and Activision supported the SNES and Genesis pretty much equally. Multiplatform games were quite common for Western titles. By far the biggest Western titles released that generation were the first three Mortal Kombat games and NBA Jam (Japan still ruled the day back then). Sega got the better deal for MK1 since the SNES version was sanitized and bloodless, but that wasn't a factor for MK2 and MK3, and violence was never a factor for NBA Jam. But even with less popular titles the largest Western developers usually made versions of them for both systems. They never showed any clear preference to either Nintendo or Sega. And in the previous generation they had negligible presence anyway, with the 16-bit era being the time when Western third parties started to reassert themselves on consoles after the Crash of '83 moved the focus to Japan.

Third parties had ample opportunity to ditch Nintendo in the 16-bit era. They chose not to. They even continued supporting the SNES to an extent after the PS1 was released, and continued supporting Nintendo's handhelds. But in Gen 5, the big Japanese their parties started putting all their biggest and best games on the PS1 and neglecting the N64 (with Capcom and Konami giving it only token support). We have evidence showing that the CD format was what compelled them to switch. We have no evidence that Nintendo drove them away because of some licensing policy or anything like that.

You are aware that because of Nintendo clauses for exclusivity (even after laxed) several "ports" ended up being different games developed by different studios, right?

Also as posted by an user Konami was already using Sony chip for their árcades, and that had nothing to do with CD.

Your post direct that most of the third parties favored Nintendo or stay exclusive, most on VGC will claim that Nintendo 1st parties were the best in the gen, and yet Nintendo wouldn't have won that gen without Sega moving on to Sega CD and 32X (besides Saturn). So using the claim that because Nintendo first party was better on the 5th gen and wouldn't lose so much of the 3rd party but would anyway I see little reason to see why N64CD would do better than SNES with not one but 2 big competitors.

Plus many of the games didn't need CDs, including we have some best versions on N64 because of it, while others even without CGI scenes benefited from CD.

So I keep my instance that you understimate Sony and overestimate Nintendo on your projection.