The world.

The controller on the cube didnt help, and neither did the properity disc

Insane game prices, strange media solutions and poor relations with the game developers. The Wii actually has, in part at least, all three problems but it doesn't seem to have any negative effect at all.
I think maybe Ninty were just a little ahead of their time, is all.

It doesn't even have insane game prices in part. That problem is on the HD systems. As for relations, Nintendo has been rebuilding them.

@rol, the CD prices were not the icing. They were the main factor. N64 carts had a tiny profit margin compared to CDs. You're actually claiming that was just a minor reason? That's a pretty major one. As for Nintendo's policies, half of them were dropped due to court cases years before, so a lot of them could not have been a factor here. Nintendo wasn't perfect, but it's a fallacy that Nintendo's policies drove developers away from the N64.

The driving away was actually in the 16-bit era, when developers were giving support to the competition.

Lack of 3rd party and use of cartridges over CDs for the N64 and the use of small dvds for the gamcube.

Cartrages, and with the Cube it was the ps2, kiddie image, and not much 3rd party suport.

Even if it is not a fallacy, the opposite is not necessarily true (good relations get more 3rd party support). Sega was said to be the role model for the 3rd party treatment and the Saturn support was not much better than the N64. 3rd parties were not very reluctant to abandon the sinking PS3 or cut the initial good support for the PSP. Gaming market is momentum based and 3rd parties usually chose the safest route (or what they believe it is).

Nintendo's failings started a generation before the N64, with the SNES. Specifically, they made the SNES to compete with the Genesis. And that was the beginning of their fall from the lofty position they'd made for themselves with the NES. Like so many companies, their response to the first truly effective assault on their market share was to make a system to claim that market share back by fighting the same battle as their competitors, instead of making their competitors irrelevant with another blue ocean strategy.

While this worked alright, the main reason why was because their competitors were either small-time like themselves (as in the case of Sega), or not interested/capable of fully conquering the market in spite of their size (as with NEC). When Sony entered the picture, however, that all changed. In a red ocean of directly competing products, the one with the most money can buy themselves the most success, and that's exactly what Sony did. Nothing short of breaking out of the market of direct competition could have helped Nintendo during the years of 1995 to 2006, as a result.

The thing is that everyone says it was the carts because Square said outright that the cost of the carts was too much for them, so they left, and the rest of the developers followed.

So we say it was the reason developers left, because the developers said that was why they left. We didn't just pull this one out of our asses. We had empirical proof for it.

The Gamecube had 12 titles at launch which was about double the PS2 and XBOX(US), so I don't think that is an effective argument. Especially when Dreamcast had 22 launch titles.

Gamecube also had 180 Titles launched in 6 months. The reall issue, no one cared.

I think the real element that led to Nintendo's lack of sales would be atributed to them being obviously black balled by retailers and members of the periodical community/news orginizations. I have never seen such a crappy job of game coverage on a major system in all my life. EGM reviewed less than 1% of total Gamecube games. When you went into a game store there was like one shelving unit for Gamecube (Hence the Penny Arcade comic "We are'nt aloud to admit Gamecube exsists, who said the G word?). Market Bias is what hurt nintendo the most. Why this happened I don't know, but I think it's obvious that had it recieved equal treatment with XBOX and PS2 we would have seen an enteirly different story last gen.