|
Soundwave said:
N64 would've outsold the NES if it had the same developer support the SNES/NES had.
The fact that it still somehow managed to sell 33 million consoles with $80 games and long stretches where it only got like 1 game every month (if that) is unbelievable.
In fact it sold exactly the same as the SNES did in the US and Europe basically despite being starved for games, the decline came from Japan and that decline was because it lost the Japanese RPGs like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy for no good reason.
You add Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil, Tekken, and other third party titles to Mario 64, GoldenEye, and Zelda: OoT and they would have doubled sales easily, probably more than that.
The N64 was outselling the Playstation into 1997 quite routinely, it's not until the really ugly software droughts started and FF7 launched on PSOne in September '97 that Sony pulled away (actually even then the N64 had a solid holiday 1997 largely thanks to GoldenEye coming out nowhere). Until then the N64 was the fastest selling console ever by a large margin. They didn't have games to keep that fire going. The N64 was a system that the public liked and was incredibly enthusiastic about, it was the PS4 of its day, until people began to realize the system was not getting games.
|
I like the idea that it's the games that sell consoles, you rarely see it in videogames forums.
I agree you to an extent. Snes was already a decline from NES, but what happened between 4th and 5th gen, was that the game centric microcomputers disappeared from the market. In the end it was a question of where these people would go - if anywhere. Anyway, I think Iwata was thinking the same as you just did, when Nintendo was designing the Wii, as Nintendo's thesis was to have as much games as possible on it. He even went as far as to use Sony as an example.
Considering how much more expensive SNES games were, N64 games seemed cheap. Also the availability of games consoles was much much better in the 5th gen than in the 4th. This was in part thanks to Sony, that could get Playstations everywhere they sold Sony electronics via it's existing distribution channels. Btw in retrospect it looks laughable that Sega and Nintendo were afraid of Japanese electronics giants because of how much cheaper they could produce electronics in their own factories, when the real threat was the distribution channel of these companies. Kinda like the internet for brick and mortar.
