Alternate history: N64 goes with CDs instead of cartridges

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

DonFerrari said:

Your analysis is very good, but fails on the fact that the market wanted change against Nintendo policies. So you are really being very favorable to Nintendo (to the point they would do much better than they did with SNES itself, which had all the advantages you listed, Sony was the one that brought the big expansion to the market that Sega and Nintendo had established).

What policies are those?

There's no evidence that gamers would have jumped ship without the games to incentivize them to do so (games and price are the two biggest factors by far in determining a system's success), and there's no evidence that the big third parties would have jumped ship anyway regardless of format. We have interviews with Square staff where they routinely single out the N64's cartridge format as a reason for switching to the PS1, so we do know that format was the reason why arguably the most important PS1 game came to the PS1 in the first place. Enix almost certainly switched over for the same reason. CDs offered over ten times the capacity of an N64 cartridge at one-tenth the cost, which made them extremely attractive to many established publishers who wanted to make grand adventures (the N64 was not known for its strong selection of JRPGs). Capcom and Konami released games for the Saturn as well as the PS1 before the former tanked in Japan and the latter hit the big time, which is in keeping with their prior behavior of supporting two systems, but their support for the N64 was minimal, again almost certainly due to the expensive, low-capacity cartridge format (both of them released far more games for the GC than they ever did for the N64, even if they weren't putting their biggest and best games on it).

Every bit of evidence accumulated over the past 23 years points to Nintendo's decisions when it comes to hardware design being the reason why they've struggled with third-party support on their home consoles after the 16-bit era.

"Let's us all remember GameCube was disc based and suffered an even worse defeat against PS2, and we can't put the "brand" as a big advantage for PS there since Nintendo had a longer image on the market and much more fans."

The PS2 was riding the momentum of the PS1, while the GameCube was also having to split the remainder of the U.S. market share with Xbox. Oh, and the GC's discs were mini-DVDs with a capacity of only 1.5MB, only a bit over double that of a CD, a third the capacity of a single-layer DVD, and less than 18% the capacity of a double-layer DVD. Many PS2 & Xbox games would not have fit on a single GC disc (even some PS1 games wouldn't have). Few developers were in the habit of splitting games across multiple discs, and nearly all of the relatively small number of multi-disc releases after Gen 5 weren't actually multi-disc games, with the second disc usually being a bonus disc with extra features (though a tiny handful of post-Gen 5 games did have the multiplayer on Disc 2, and FFXIII was a 2-disc release on the 360). Also, a developer that worked on Max Payne cited the GameCube’s lower main RAM (24MB, vs 32MB for the PS2 and 64MB for the Xbox) as a reason for why they didn’t port their game to the system despite releasing it for the PS2 and Xbox, though as far as I'm aware of they were the only ones citing RAM as a concern.

In any case, many of the most popular third-party games in Gen 6 were either PS2 exclusive, or were released on the PS2 & Xbox but not the GameCube. The GC missed out on huge titles like Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Grand Theft Auto, Kingdom Hearts, and Star Wars: Battlefront. While it wasn't the only factor, the GameCube's format was almost certainly what kept many big-name games off of the system. As a result, while the GameCube did have arguably better third-party support than the N64, it was still inferior to that enjoyed by the Xbox and especially the PS2.

I'm pretty sure you know about the policies from Nintendo on NES and SNES but a quicklink for you https://books.google.com/books?id=XiM0ntMybNwC&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=the+draconian+policies+of+nintendo&source=bl&ots=1YvtCgsvLl&sig=ACfU3U1N4c0c-tOfQR9wqrK2-4L66X1m9g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi4vv3H7oLkAhUoo1kKHdjPAjUQ6AEwBXoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20draconian%20policies%20of%20nintendo&f=false

https://nerdtrek.com/nintendos-restrictive-licensing-history/

So several of those devs were ready to jump ship. CD-ROM is a reason for it? Sure, but Sega CD had a CD, Saturn had a CD and that didn't made Nintendo lose. It was an effect of Sony involvement.

We always go the way of all the success of Sony is the result of competitors doing bad, no merits to Sony.

Xbox had better HW and DVD and didn't get many of the games PS2 received.

Momentum per Momentum, NES came from SNES and sold much lower than the other due to Genesis (and it wasn't due to CD as well), N64 came from SNES. So the least momentum piece would be PS1 and it still won.

Depending on the incentive games will release on platform with limitations, RE4 released on PS2 even though promissed not to because of the limitations as an example, and the Switch ports are another.