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jarrod on 13 February 2011
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RolStoppable said:
jarrod said:

Enix made GBC and GBA games just fine though.  So why would Nintendo be the problem?

If PS1 had struggled, then Saturn would've gotten Ridge Racer though.  And Saturn got Resident Evil anyway.  These examples aren't exactly highlighting how PS1 would've avoided a Saturn like 3rd party landscape if N64 had gone CD-ROM...

Squaresoft and Enix are not the same company. Nintendo was the problem, because they wanted to uphold their policy of third parties either making games exclusively for them or not at all. With such rules it's no wonder that third parties would jump ship at the first opportunity offered to them. Nintendo may have thrown that kind of dictatorship over board as time passed by, but at that point it was already too late.

Sony bought third party exclusivity, that's the point. Tomb Raider 2 was only on the PS1 (ignoring the PC), Resident Evil 2 for the time it mattered as well. An N64 with CD-ROM wouldn't have prevented Sony from buying exclusivity.

Nintendo's full exclusivity mandates went away around 1990.  That's why you saw companies like Capcom, Konami, Taito and others start developing for other consoles, like Genesis and PC Engine. And like I already said, there were still other issues... a lot of Square's beef with Nintendo came from the preferential treatment shown to Enix in terms of mask-ROM allotments and scheduling.  But the fact remains, the one big tipping point was N64 using carts... if not for that 3rd parties would've stayed on board.

Tomb Raider 2 actually had a Saturn version btw, but it was canned when Sega scuttled their Eclipse add-on (TR2 and VF3 were going to be launch titles for it).  And as soon as there was another viable CD-ROM based console available (Dreamcast) Tomb Raider once again went multiplatform.  Part of the reason Sony was able to so easily incentivize exclusivity though was that they were already market leader by the time deals started rolling in... and their leadership position based pretty much entirely on exclusive 3rd party content, most of which they wouldn't have gotten if they were going up against a CD-ROM based N64.  I still think PlayStation would've gotten some games, and even some big ones (Metal Gear Solid for example), but it'd have lost the vast majority of it's defacto exclusives and companies like Square and Enix most likely would've remained N64 only.