| TheSource said: You guys put too much stock in the cartridge vs. cd issue. The problem was N64 bombed in Japan, not that it had cartridges. In 1999-2001 you saw publishers complain about PS2 development alot...but once it was clear how well it would sell in Japan and worldwide everybody shut up. DS has a slightly updated version of the N64 cartridges at a small size with much of the same limitations but the difference is it was a smash in Japan. Thats why it has so many S-E games, even though PSP is disc based and doing well in Japan too and initially looked like a safe bet to knock Nintendo off in Japan with portables. |
The choice to use cartridges was an issue that did impact their support from third parties because there was a growing movement towards "Cinematic" games which (at the time) translated to "Games with FMV" ... Even CDs were pretty inadequate to the task given how many Playstation games were on multiple CDs that were filled with poorly compressed video. On top of this cartridges were very expensive which meant that developers had the choice of selling their games for more or taking smaller profits off of the sales of games.
There were benefits from cartridges though, and developers liked the quick data transfer rates which eliminated the need for loading times; and also created more seemless worlds. This also meant that they didn't need to store as much redundant data (for load time optimization) which meant that a similar N64 game didn't need as much storage space as a Playstation equlivalent.
In my opinion, you're right that there were bigger issues at play than the cartridges vs. CD ...
Leading upto the release of the N64 Nintendo openly talked about creating a platform with a smaller library that was only made up of the best games; in a lot of ways it was similar to how people suggest that they shouldn't allow shovelware developers to produce for the Wii today. There was talk of creating a more meaningful "Nintendo Seal of Quality" that would seperate good games from bad games, and most third party publishers were afraid that they wouldn't be able to get the seal and would (therefore) see poor sales as a result.
The N64 was a pain in the ass to develop for ...
- There was too little memory and memory bottlenecks
- The GPU had too small of a texture cache and microcode (primitive shaders) was difficult to write
- the CPU only had a 32bit bus, no L2 cache and (IIRC) vector units which were confusing to developers
- etc.
Had they done a couple of things differently (memory expansion by default, 16KB texture cache, 64bit bus, and 64KB L2 cache) a lot of the difficulties would have been easier to deal with. (Edit: They could have also increased the addressing space on the cartridges by a couple of bits which would have increased the theoritical size of cartridges which might have helped later in the generation)
The final problem was Nintendo's CEO ended up picking fights with executives of major Japaneese third party publishers, and their arogant attitude drove these publishers away.
