nintendo made more money out of the cartridges because publishers had to buy them from Nintendo. it was a great move financially. or not.
we dont really know if it wouldve cost them more or less to ally with Sony or Panasonic than the money they got from cartridges...
in the end the only real benefit would ve been N64 graphics. CD format wouldve pushed N64 to Dreamcast lvl. almost

This is easy. Nintendo and SOny were working together to make a CD add on to the SNES and was called the PlayStation. Sony wanted a lot of control and so Snintendo backed out and went with Phillips in a deal letting phillips make a CD platform but also a add on. The addon never happened. Sony went ahead to make thier own PlaySation. Nintendo went cart instead of CD.


Had Nintendo gone CD Rom. Sony PlayStation would have gone the same route as Phillips CDi & 3D0. Just fact. Simply because NIntendo went cart because they were expensive and held little data vs cheap held a lot of data appealed to developers.

By this time thanks to SEGA Nintendo's Stronghold on 3rd party was marginal at best anyway

Phillips held the rights to CD Rom

The Saturn was something of a disaster.  Without the PS1 around, Nintendo would have dominated the generation easily.  That's a near-monopoly of the market.  Unless you're saying the Saturn would have done much, much better without Sony in the picture?

I think they would've dominated either way if they had compromised with third parties on the CD format ... the Playstation started very slowly too. The N64 actually was outselling the Playstation early on, when the games dried up, the Playstation started to pull ahead. 

Also the stuff about Nintendo not allowing devleopers to make as many games as they wanted was kinda overblown ... the rule was a throw back to the Atari era, to prevent a flood of crappy games. But generally speaking, developers couldn't make that many games anyway ... it's not like the Genesis had more third party titles from Capcom, Konami, than the SNES did. 

Nintendo did a lot of good things with the N64 actually ... they just completely f*cked the format decision, otherwise I think they would've sold over 100 million consoles that generation. 

Playstation would exist since it was developed as an add-on for SNES, but Nintendo would have easily won the generation with games like Dragon Quest VII and Final Fantasy 64 (=VII) which have been very important for the success of Playstation, not only in Japan.

Nintendo's choice to stick with cartridges has gone down in history as one of the biggest mistakes in the industry for a reason. It's probably their biggest mistake, even more so than getting into online late. There might not even be a Playstation if they'd gone to disks, and if there wasn't a Playstation, there wouldn't be an Xbox either. Sega might even still have left, and Nintendo would have a monopoly until someone else tried or they were forcibly split. If anything, having competition has kept Nintendo humble. If they'd dominated like that, a PS3-like $600 console might have been the only choice, and it might have crashed the industry. Wouldn't that be something. Total Nintendoom Domination. Nintotalendominationom. = D

I don't understand why Nintendo should be irrelevant in Europe, they were clear market leader with the SNES and the market was not much different than the US market by that time. With a disk based system Nintendo would have been market leader in Europe too.

It is just the PC that is much stronger in some large European countries and this fact alone can explain the lower console sales.

What if Nintendo had released the N64 DD add on 12 months after the N64 launched like they originally stated. If realized this was going to provide an extra 64MB of rewritable storage onto a possible 64MB of cartridge space. Although this still leaves you well short of the capacity of a CD Rom I wonder if it would of made a difference to 3rd party support....

Sony moved on to disks with the psp, then right back to carts with the Vita. Sometimes a cartridge is just the better choice.