Alternate history: N64 goes with CDs instead of cartridges

[d21lewis]

DonFerrari said:

Shadow1980 said:

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.

PS1 was so dominant that in the year 2000, Playstation WAS video games. The Dreamcast was dead before it even arrived because of PS2 hype. Even with a lackluster library, the PS2 was flying off of shelves until the Great games began to arrive in late 2001. I tried to get a PS2 on launch day. Even had a friend who worked at Walmart. He came back empty handed. I couldn't get a PS2 until like March 2001 and even then I had to drive like 70 miles.

PSM magazine had an article back then saying that the console war was over before GameCube and Xbox sold their first console. They had stats and everything. The year's headstart pretty much sealed the deal. It didn't matter if the kiddie looking GameCube was more powerful (and didn't even play DVDs). It didn't matter if the unproven Microsoft Xbox was more powerful. PS2 had the legacy of the PS1 and enough key features and support to nullify anything the competition had to offer.

PS1 was where Xbox was at launch. It was unproven and gamers weren't open to change. PS1 had the advantage of Sega being pretty much unreliable and Nintendo 64 having multiple delays. The choice to stick with cartridges was just the nail in the coffin.

And yes, tons of other consoles used CDs but up until the 5th gen, the advantages were still being worked out. It was more or less music and cutscenes at the expense of speed and reliability. That's another reason why Nintendo stuck with carts. Discs were fragile and gamers were perceived to be mostly kids (Though I think the average gamer at the time was 30).

Gaming was ready to grow up. Disc based technology was mature enough. 3D tech was at a point where believeable worlds could be created. Saturn was still stronger in the 2D department as Sega didn't focus on 3D like the competion did (Sony actually turned down certain 2D games because they felt 3D was the future).  It was just a perfect storm and PlayStation was the only real option. 

*Edit* Did I even reply to the right person!? 🤷‍♂️