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Soundwave on 25 November 2014
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Shadow1980 said:
The N64 was successful in the U.S. According to the NPD, it pulled about 18 million units lifetime, more than the SNES and Genesis. In fact, during its first 15 months on the market in the U.S., it sold faster that any other system until the PS2, and even today it's still the third fastest-selling system in that span, though the PS4 may potentially bump it down to fourth. Until the release of FFVII, the N64 was outpacing the PS1 in the U.S. While the PS1 eventually outsold the N64 by a comfortable margin, the N64 was still the third best-selling post-crash system ever in the U.S. by the end of the century, only being beaten by the PS1 and NES.

However, Japan is where it suffered. Due to the loss of support from Square, Enix, Capcom, and Konami, Japanese gamers switched to PlayStation en masse. While the SNES officially sold over 17 million units in Japan lifetime, the N64 only sold about 5.5M.

In Europe, Nintendo never made a big impact outside of the Wii. The PS1 was the first truly successful console in the region, and PlayStation has remained the dominant brand for nearly two decades, aside from the four years the Wii took the top spot. The NES, SNES, and N64 combined sold less than 23 million units in Europe.


There's no doubt in my mind had Nintendo compromised with third parties and at least agreed to a CD-drive add-on early into the life cycle that they would've sold 50+ million easy. 

N64 was genuinely something a lot of people wanted and the public really took to it ... it's just than when people saw that completely one-sided situation with game releases versus the Playstation that just killed the N64. 

Imagine the PS4's first year ... and then you basically give XBox One every big third party game for the rest of the generation. 

People didn't know the N64 was going to turn out like that, at that time buying a Nintendo console meant you got all the third party games, it was that way with the NES and SNES, there was no reason to expect otherwise and most people didn't know the economics of cartridge vs. CD manufacturing.