What If N64 Didn't Have Cartridges?

[Soundwave]

pokoko said:

Soundwave said:

pokoko said:
It's hard to say, really.

Remember, at that time, many third-parties WANTED Sony to succeed. Nintendo's near monopoly had them dictating unfavorable terms and conditions to publishers and developers and many were very unhappy with the situation. It's not as clear-cut as everyone siding with Nintendo automatically.

Nintendo didn't have a near monopoly by the mid-1990s ... Sega was getting ports of most third party games. 

Even if games like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 1/2/3 etc. were multi-plat ... Nintendo would've dominated that gen IMO. They had the more powerful system, the most hype, the best exclusives, they just had no third party support which caused huge droughts for the system and basically forced even N64 owners to have to buy a Playstation as well. 

The Saturn was something of a disaster.  Without the PS1 around, Nintendo would have dominated the generation easily.  That's a near-monopoly of the market.  Unless you're saying the Saturn would have done much, much better without Sony in the picture?

I think they would've dominated either way if they had compromised with third parties on the CD format ... the Playstation started very slowly too. The N64 actually was outselling the Playstation early on, when the games dried up, the Playstation started to pull ahead. 

Also the stuff about Nintendo not allowing devleopers to make as many games as they wanted was kinda overblown ... the rule was a throw back to the Atari era, to prevent a flood of crappy games. But generally speaking, developers couldn't make that many games anyway ... it's not like the Genesis had more third party titles from Capcom, Konami, than the SNES did. 

Nintendo did a lot of good things with the N64 actually ... they just completely f*cked the format decision, otherwise I think they would've sold over 100 million consoles that generation.