If the N64 had a CD-ROM Drive, would've Nintendo won the generation in sales?

[Jumpin]

Intrinsic said:
The N64 didn't lose because it still used carts. Or at least that's only 20% of the reason. The other 80% was because that was when it nearly totally lost al their party support. Playstation basically built their platform on the failings of Nintendo. Hell, you can even say that the only reason PlayStation even exists today is thanks to how Nintendo treated sony.

In a manner of speaking, Playstation s the bastard step child of Nintendo.

Most, if not all of that third-party support was lost because of cartridges; it was a really arrogant decision by Nintendo to put devs in that position. The reason PSX textures and audio were so much crisper than N64s was because of the file-size limitations resulting from cartridges. Much of the dev process on the N64 revolved around shrinking game size down. It was difficult to get things looking both nice in 3D, and small in size, thanks to the use of cartridges.

But the difficulty of development wasn't the only problem. Cartridges were also far more expensive for publishers to sell. So, on the business end, it was really terrible. Prices were often heavily offset to the customer. The business reason was also the reason for the push to fit on the 8MB cartridges. George Harrison, former President of Nintendo of America confirmed that the business reason surrounding cartridge size and space was the main reason - he claims Nintendo wanted to stick with cartridges because of piracy concerns and that didn't go over well with third parties who then flocked to Playstation.

But I do agree, Nintendo's former CEO Yamauchi really aggravated relationship with third parties after that. Square's former Hironobu Sakaguchi and Tomoyuki Takechi said Yamauchi was convicted to never doing business with them again because they couldn't do FF7 on Nintendo hardware. But non-leadership staff from Square have said they were not allowed into Nintendo offices until the age of Iwata.

So, I think that maybe there were other issues that contributed to Nintendo never really recovering from the cartridge fiasco on the N64 - political issues with Hiroshi Yamauchi who, IMO, was not as great of a leader as many have made him out to be. His poor qualities really shone through in the N64 era. Unfortunately, because of Japanese politeness, it's rare to find people who will directly state their positions about him.

"Playstation basically built their platform on the failings of Nintendo" is a really accurate statement of the situation, IMO. I don't think Sony would have got far without Nintendo blundering with cartridges. Remember, PSX was getting killed by the SNES; had the N64 avoided their cartridge crash, I don't think the status quo would have changed. In fact, I wonder if Nintendo would have dominated even harder than they did in the 16-bit era.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 03 September 2020