So you are saying that Japan is a backstabbing boyfriend to Nintendo and Sony is who Japan is cheating on with Nintendo?

Your brain is an interesting place, Ryan.

Hey, most of those people probably felt bad about it. I know I did. I went from scoffing at Sony and hoping Nintendo would quickly show them who was boss to being filled with doubt and inner conflict. Then I went, "oh, Final Fantasy VII," and bought a PS1.

The better question is probably, "how did Nintendo feel knowing that they'd failed to keep previously loyal customers on their side even when they should have had all the momentum?"

I think you've reached the core issue.

I can SO see Nintendo yelling, "You little whore!" at Sony, or trying to keep customers by saying, "... I think I'm pregnant."

If Nintendo wants loyalty it shouldn't let itself get fat and stop giving head.

The Japanese gamers go to where the games are at. When the Playstation launched, a lot of devs jumped on board and along with it came a shit ton of RPG's and Japan orientated games. It's the very same reason why the PSVita is selling poorly over there and the 3DS dominating everything else.

They only care about games, not brand loyalty to a console manufacturer (as it should be.)

The N64 had a lot of exclusive games that Americans wanted, but the Japanese didn't. (in general) Games that were loved in all regions sold well in all regions. Vgchartz is being a bitch at loading the games totals page so I'll go on a limb and say that Mario64, Zelda OoT and games like Paper Mario sold proportionately in japan, but most rare games are high in US/Europe.

Also, Sony is a huge japanese company, and most important 3rd parties at the time were Japanese. The biggest IPs at the time were japanese so seeing 3rd parties migrate to the PSX (for good reason) also led to this phenomenon. But it's an interesting point you raise nontheless, that Japan was much less receptive to the N64 than america was.

Here, this is kinda interesting:

The thing is: you are thinking like a loyalist, that is not true for 90% of the consumers.
Video games are toys, I will buy the cooler toy, I don´t give a shit if it is made by Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.

It wasn't the Japanese consumers fault, it was largely Nintendo for failing to follow the times, not following technical and format norms, pissing on 3rd parties in the past which cost them a great deal of support and generally selling out Sony, abandoning their CD console joint venture.

Why doesn't anyone ever blame Nintendo's problems on Nintendo? It's not a huge conspiracy, they have made some grave mistakes up over the years, just like any other major company in history.

This is like saying American's betrayed MS by buying iPads instead of windows laptops.

Besides Wii totally dominated PS3 sales in Japan for this gen.

You got that right.

Their apparent obsession with very small home consoles seems to imply they´re tailor made for Japan first, the rest of the world second, never mind the rest of the world buys far more home consoles than Japan (not saying small consoles aren´t something other markets want, just an observation)