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

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Segata_Fran said:

My conclusions from this thread:
Many people dare to think Playstation exists "thanks" to Nintendo, succeded "thanks" to Nintendo, got FFVII "thanks" to Nintendo. So basically they're trying too hard to deny the Playstation value and merit. 100% of PS success came from themselves deciding to enter the video games industry and doing things better than the competition.
Many people still believe to this day that N64 is superior in "every" aspect except for the CDROM. They didn't know or simply ignore specs where PS is better.
There's even people saying N64 games would look "even better" with CDs because of storage space on discs, when in reality graphics will still look blockier than PS (lower poly capabilities) and textures will still look extremely blurry (N64 inferior texture cache size).
Some people say Playstation games were "garbage/puke" before FFVII, when in reality it had a bunch of great and few multimillion sellers from 1st and 3rd party (many of them released even before the N64):
1995: Ridge Racer, Tekken, Twisted Metal, Rayman, Arc The Lad, Tomb Raider, Jumping Flash.
1996: Tekken 2, Crash Bandicoot, Resident Evil, Suikoden, Arc The Lad II, Twisted Metal 2, Parappa The Rapper, Persona, Wipeout 2097, Jumping Flash 2, Blood Omen.
1997 (the same year of FFVII): Ace Combat 2, FF Tactics, Hot Shots Golf, Croc, Tomb Raider 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Tales of Destiny, Gran Turismo, Tekken 3, Alundra, Klonoa, Symphony of the Night, Oddworld.
Yeah, shitty games...
No one say Nintendo refused CDRom and kept using cartridges so they could keep all the cartridges manufacture revenue and maximize their profits, which they had until then as an avaricious and monopolistic.
Speaking of tiranny, their money addiction did put big pay wall on smaller developers while returning only a small amount of the revenue for the developer. Playstation on the other hand was a platform created for developers to create games easy, fast, and with a cheaper licensing fee. In conclusion, it opened so many doors for small studios to have more freedom and accesibility for making games (something similar to indie games getting more exposure and relevance in recent years since PS3/360 era), and ended up having a lot of games from these studios and the chance to be creative.

- This is a comment from a Reddit user:
"I once had a contract for N64 development.
Nintendo set minimum production amounts, normally 15,000 copies at minimum. You get to choose who does the packaging of the carts.
Production costs: First you have the production costs. Nintendo makes the carts in Japan at their factory, so they get the money from production.
Then nintendo takes a royalty, say $7 each cart for logos, nintendo seal of approval, etc.
Packaging runs you about $150,000 for the 15,000 carts. This includes manuals, the boxes, and shrink wrapping. This does not include delivery fees.
In the end on a $55 cartridge, a profit of $6-7 was made by the developer. Nintendo got all the rest. This is why nintendo didn't abandon cartridges for CDS. They were addicted to the money."

Yeah everyone could've won their generation if they did things better, but they didn't, as simple as that. We all can make a "what if" discussion with everything that happened in video games history, but I can't stand how arrogant Nintendo mostly, and how they always "get away" with their bullshit being glorified and praised by a good part of their fanbase for these practices.
And yes, they could've won if they used CD's, but many of these facts here would have remained the same.

Actually N64's polycount was roughly twice the number that of PS's. Texture cache was what made Nintendo to shoot itself on the foot. N64 had higher resolution, higher polycount, better hardware effects than PS - but the texture cache was minimal even by mid-90's standards, which made the games look blurry. What the CD made possible, was to stream textures directly from the disc - that was equally possible on N64 aswell, but carts did not have space for uncompressed textures/videos.

The added cost of carts came with higher price on store shelf. N64 games were roughly 10€ more expensive than PS games. Out of the "55$" game, at least 50% is the retailer's share - this is why everyone wants to sell their games online by download.

Even if N64 had CD-ROM, it would still control the medium and who gets to use it - just like Sony did. Sony just took lower cut than Nintendo. If Nintendo had used CDs, it would have made more money themselves, because the cost for the medium had been lower, but the actual profit could have been higher.

And of course there was minimum quantity of medium a publisher needed to order when publishing a game - this is how wholesale works. No matter what system are you publishing a game to - on a physical medium - you need to manufacture minimum of one lot of the product.