Nvidia employee acknowledges Tegra 239 SoC rumored to be powering Switch 2

[DonFerrari]

Soundwave said:

DonFerrari said:

I don't think Nintendo decision had to do with the price of the drive or it not being mainstream. It likely had more to do with the fumble of Sega-CD, CD-i and a plethora of other CD based consoles that came before N64 that they likely used to validate their decision and them became surprised that PS1 found success.

There were probably a bunch (of stupid) reasons.

I think for one, as much as I like Miyamoto, he should not have been allowed to influence hardware design to the degree that he did. A console has to be made to work for a wide variety of designers including 3rd party partners. Yes, Mario 64 may sell 10 million copies ... but how many games did Capcom, Konami, Squaresoft, Enix, EA, Acclaim, Activision, etc. etc. sell combined on the SNES or Playstation? Probably a shit ton more than 10 million copies, of which Nintendo got a $10 cut of every copy for basically doing nothing. That said as I've stated it never had to be an either/or case scenario anyway, Mario 64 was brilliant and could have ran just fine off a cartridge slot, no one is saying you have to lose the cartridge slot, the Saturn had one and a CD drive no problem. 

The Sega CD and CD-i weren't successful but the Sega CD was an add-on after all ... Nintendo's own Famicom Disk System only sold 4.4 million units for example, Nintendo should have known not to judge a tech based on what it sells as an add-on. The Philips cd-i barely had any games one could take seriously. 

I believe Nintendo had also at the time made a big investment in a cartridge manufacturing factory and they probably did not want to lose face by going with CD. But you shouldn't be making hardware decisions that impact a company for 5+ years on the basis of one factory investment. It's just not sound business logic. 

Agree with your points.

And I didn't say it was the right decision to look at Sega-CD (add-on) and CD-i (a new entrant project) and compare to a new gen system from a dominating power. But people with power of decision that wanted to avoid CD may have used those as excuses to not have CD.

We will never know all the details of why they didn't had CD and how much having it would change on cost, performance and sales, but sure it is something that we always wonder.