Alternate history: N64 goes with CDs instead of cartridges

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

DonFerrari said:

You may dismiss all you want, but it was true that they needed to make 2 versions usually with different teams or companies because of the Nintendo policies even with all claims of they being laxed. Which clearly shows devs weren't happy as you tried to deny.

Most of those games were developed by different studios. Even when it was the same studio, it would easily be chalked up to reasons other than "they hated Nintendo."

Those games were developed by different studios because Nintendo restrictions dictated that, reason why they ended up different. That adds a lot to cost and certainly can make a company displeased with the platform holder.

Not sure why would be irrelevant that they were planing support even before the gen started (on your claim that devs were waiting to see PS catch momentum before hand, while this happened even before)

What do you mean "before the gen started"? As far as I can tell, Konami's arcade systems weren't based on anything made by Sony until the ones based on PlayStation hardware were being released in 1996. In other words, Konami and Sony partnered for arcade machines after Konami started developing for the PS1, not before. That doesn't prove your point.

That proves that they had talks about, one doesn't chose partners, chips and designs in a few weeks. You don't want to accept that Sony would have gotten good support even with Nintendo had CD because PS1 would have been a loser, but these show they were already talking to support even before PS1 was a hit and/or N64 showed to be a dud.

You contradict your own numbers, if they were neck to neck while they were both supported, and after support dropped it slowed down, then the more probable outcome had support not be cut would be sales still coming. A much more possible outcome than the whole world changing if Nintendo did got CD.

"Neck-and-neck" meaning the SNES and Genesis were essentially tied for the 1992-1994 period, and the Genesis's lead in LTD sales was only slight at the end of that period. I don't see the Genesis having a convincing victory in the U.S. even if the Genesis had better support. The numbers just don't support it. If it had legs comparable to the SNES's, the result would have been a statistical tie.

Yes, statistical tie in NA, statistical tie in Europe, statistical tie RotW, lose in Japan. That would have put both very near one another.

So you are going to say Sega didn't saw a massive increase in Europe and RotW?

Master System Japan: 1M NA: 2M Europe: 6.8M RotW:3.2M Brazil: 8M (mostly after gen anyway)

Genesis Japan: 3.58M (258% increase)North America:17M (750% increase) Europe: 8.39M (23% increase) RotW 0.59M (probably wrong as Brazil alone have 3M and another place by Majesco 1.5M and missing more than 1M compared with Sega) This seem as good increase in sales in most regions

NES Japan:19.35M NA:33.49M Europe: 8.30M RotW: 0.77M

SNES Japan: 17.17M (seems like the difference is almost what Sega captured) NA: 22.88M (32% decrease) Europe: 8.15M (flat) RotW:0.9M

These RotW and Europe numbers that gone from less than 1M and 8M on SNES to 9M and 37M with Sony can hardly be claimed that Nintendo would achieve with doing what they were doing back then (they haven't found this sucess in the next gen as well).

*sigh* The SNES sold 12.8M fewer units than the NES globally. Nearly all of that loss was from NA. While the SNES didn't do as well as the NES in Japan, the Genesis was outsold by the PC Engine, selling only 3.58M to the PCE's 5.84M. If anything, NEC was more responsible for Nintendo's very modest losses in Japan in Gen 4. Sega only had a significant impact on Nintendo's sales in America, which was responsible for the vast majority of all of Sega's gen-over-gen gains in the three major markets. It's right there in the numbers, black-and-white, clear as crystal.

If you want to be dismissive better stop the conversation and remove the respect I had for you. Genesis saw a major increase on the sales while Nintendo saw decreases in all markets, so nothing show Nintendo growing the market or that they would cause Europe and RotW to major increases as you claimed they would if they had the CD. Genesis done a much better job in Japan than Master System if you want to pretend that didn't take sales away from SNES ok (and 10% isn't that modest). And seems like you decided to not reply to the sales going from 1M to 9M RotW and 9M to 37M from SNES to PS1.

The evidence is clear from they not putting games that didn't need CD on N64, nor GC, nor Wii, nor WiiU..... they didn't seem very eager to go back to Nintendo as soon as they got a viable alternative.

Really? THERE HASN'T BEEN A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE! The N64 and GC had formats with significant limitations (esp. the N64). The Wii and Wii U were underpowered. Same for the Switch. Smaller-scale projects have been released for Nintendo's handhelds, which were always avidly supported by most of the big Japanese third parties, but for the big AAA releases, they reserved their efforts for the consoles that best facilitated their needs for the types of games they wanted to make, and for the most part that hasn't been Nintendo's consoles.

And guess what they were just like that? Right, because Nintendo choose that those were enough for them and didn't care about what 3rd parties wanted.

Then you are changing more than what OP suggest that was simply having CD not changing an entire corporate philosophy.

You don't get the point of alternate history, do you? A divergence point is always implied, and a divergence point requires different conditions. Even if only a "what" is stated a "how" is always implies. If our alternate history is about Nintendo releasing a CD-based N64, it implies that Nintendo's key decision makers ended up seeing things differently regarding the format.

More personal attacks. Divergence point on OP was going CD, not changing the entire Nintendo corporation philosophy that would then make CD the choice with a lot of other indirect changes that you decide by yourself outside of the OP. There was one different condition CD, that is it. Nintendo having better relationship with developers, they listening to other companies requirements, fostering and supporting 3rd parties to sell more, advertising heavily those companies games are all changes that you decided to include. And seeing the increase in sales from FF VI to FF VII we can very well point out that if it were in N64 it wouldn't caused the impact it did on PS1.

In our reality they also didn't try DVD on GC and BD or HDDVD on Wii. They are very skeptical of market practices, and we have seem a lot of reports in the forum of they not caring about 3rd parties and hearing them. Not hard to verify this comparing to Xbox coming and getting more support than GC, also that even with big sales Wii didn't get much support. Call it what you want, Nintendo makes the HW they want and 3rd parties follow if they like. Also when you point on their reason to avoid CD you also have to consider that perhaps Mario 64 and others would had become much worse games and N64 could have done worse than it did in real world.

See above.

Weren't the norm, but if we are so much claiming FF VII gone to PS1 due to CDs we had it with 3 right? And FF IX with 4 CDs. So even though it may be somewhat of a bother they could make multiple layer or multiple disc games (or use more compression, simplified audio, etc), it was doable but devs just didn't care. You can have your doubts, but you dismiss everything negative as not possible because no one were vocal about it, but you are adamant everything would change because you have one interview from Square saying the CD tied them down.

CDs had a capacity of 700MB. FFVII was 1.5GB. Games were already getting huge. For a few PS1 games, multiple discs were a necessity. Standard DVD has a minimum capacity of 4.7GB, nearly seven times that of a CD. That was good enough for a good while, and only a handful of games needed multiple discs for the game itself (almost all of them coming at the end of the generation). There's a difference between "necessary but feasible," "feasible but not necessary," and "flat out impossible" (the latter being the case when an N64 cart has a maximum capacity of 64MB and your game is over 23 times that size).

We have seem "impossible games" like RE2 ported to N64, or RE4 ported to PS2. And good to see you go from comparing DVD to the mini available in GC (1/4 capacity, and well we had some games that used multiple DVDs, wouldn't say all were end gen still that is pointless. It was feasible but devs just didn't care because they wouldn't see relevant profits) to 64MB being 23x smaller than 700MB (yes I can agree multiple CD games could be a problem, but you coul make a multi cartrdrige game if you so much wanted using password as the "saving method", and most of the games didn't need a CD to be feasible even with a lot of work, movies and audio sounds would be the biggest part of the memory consumption and for plenty of games those would also be not necessary or could be translated to in game engine text).