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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Nintendo What-If?

Soundwave said:

The decision to use cartridges for the N64 was made in 1993 or early 1994. This was like 4-5 years before CD-ROM piracy actively became a thing and CD-burners weren't available at that time. 

I doubt it had a significant impact on Nintendo's decisions at that time. In 1993, having a computer with just a regular CD-ROM drive was considered all fancy schmancy, lol.

I remember following the N64's development like crazy, in those days I would go to the book store the first day they got a new issue of EGM or GameFan looking for new N64 info. I still remember reading the N64 wouldn't support CD-ROM in that book store all those years ago in early 1994 and this big sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach like "uh oh ... this feels like a massive mistake". I followed every bit of the N64's development. 

Sure enough I don't think Nintendo has ever really recovered from that mistake in the console business. That decision is where everything went wrong for Nintendo, if they had chosen to compromise instead and included CD for third parties and let Miyamoto and his EAD team use cartridges, hell they could have done CD + cartridge combo games too to save on expensive cartridge sizes (game data could be on the cart, orchestral music and FMVs could've been on the CD disc). 

Nintendo of course already had experience with discs, because of Snes CD-ROM. As I said, home piracy wasn't what they were concerned about, but the pirated games made in China and sold at a mall. Cartridges in theory at least are much harder to pirate, as you can have a lockout chip that's hard to copy, instead of just pressing disc images. It has to have been pretty clear at the time that the CD burners will become commodity.

I was very happy with the cartridges, though the audio department suffered from them. N64 design philosophy was so much different than that of Playstations, so the benefit of CD's had been marginal at best - N64 was designed to render everything by engine, as PSX was designed to stream from the disc. 

Even if there had been CD's, the 3rd parties had not developed N64 games, because of the standards Nintendo forced everyone to follow - it wasn't until the Wii Nintendo ditched the quality standards everyone's so bitchy about.



Ei Kiinasti.

Eikä Japanisti.

Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.

 

Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.

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zero129 said:

No i dont.

Sega like i said made mistakes. The Sega CD (Ok they could of got away with this one). And the 32x should of never been released, after they where and didnt get much support people lost some fait with sega.

Then Saturn getting rushed to market being super hard to program for (And i pretty sure it was expensive on release?) also didnt help them.

Nintendo didnt have them problems going into the N64 era.

Nintendo then is like Sony now, people where willing to wait for the N64 and it showed by being one of the fastest selling consoles ever on launch (At the time anyway).

But thanks to Nintendo not using CD and being hard to develope for (Im sure if they went with a cd formate devs would of put up with the hard development just like PS2/3) meant Nintendo lost many 3rd partys to the much easier to develope for and the gaining traction of the PS1.

A new king had entered and just done everything right well their competitiors fucked up.

But this should be a word of warning to show you can never be too big too fall, and sometimes the bigger you are the harder the fall.

Yes, Sony did things right at a time the competitors didn't. But this is just throwing words around without digging into the reasons. Sega had too close releases of too many devices, and because of them wanting to be first in the market, Saturn released with no games - but this isn't something you could not fix.

Saturn was hard to program because it was intended to be only a 2D capable console, so Sega made a quick solution and added another set of same hardware in Saturn in order to have enough power to render 3D (if I recall). What made it hard to program, was you needed to program two threads in order to optimise the hardware. Not only was Saturn expensive, so was Playstation.

You keep pointing out, that the developers are willing to put up hard development (=expensive) when there's money to be made - which is my point excactly when talking about cartridges, because all they add is expenses. Sony had developers on board because Sony had the least standards, so it was relatively easy to get on board.



Ei Kiinasti.

Eikä Japanisti.

Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.

 

Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.

@zero129: Haha, yes and no. I did try to clarify some things, but also to point out that the problems were elsewhere than the lack of CD's. This doesn't mean it did not have ANYTHING at all to do with it, just that the impact of storage medium is hugely overweighted.



Ei Kiinasti.

Eikä Japanisti.

Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.

 

Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.

wouldnt change much regrads sales.
Most people didnt know all those fancy things about cartridges and cds. They just bought the system their friends had



bdbdbd said:
@zero129: Haha, yes and no. I did try to clarify some things, but also to point out that the problems were elsewhere than the lack of CD's. This doesn't mean it did not have ANYTHING at all to do with it, just that the impact of storage medium is hugely overweighted.

Depends on the situation. 

For the N64 it made a huge difference, the N64 was selling huge out of the gate too, it was just the lack of games which was brought about by no CD support that slowed its momentum, at the time it was like the PS4 of its era, breaking a lot of records for sales. 

CD made a huge difference for Nintendo, for Sega they had about 505958585 other problems that compounded things, but even there the Saturn actually did outsell the Playstation for a long while in Japan for example, it wasn't until Squaresoft tipped the scales by choosing Sony over Sega for FF7 that things shifted. 

In any case FF7 should've been an N64 game, they only lost it because they gave Squaresoft no choice but to leave by choosing cartridges. Take that away from Sony and its pretty much game over. There's no way a system with Mario 64, Zelda: OoT, GoldenEye, FF7 and multiplats of most everything else was going to lose.