^^You're right... Sega lost Europe with the Saturn but they could have had a bigger share in USA and Japan was no mans land till Final Fantasy 7 way later.

This deffinetly could have helped a lot.

@Lord

This is the case now. Back then Nintendo was just as difficult. They didn't allow any 3rd party to see how they optimize N64 games...including Rare.

I know they weren't sharing optimization code. I mean in terms of sharing art, models, and other assets. Nintendo did do that back then, such as with Majora's Mask, and they apparently allowed the assets from Super Mario 64 to be used for the Mario Party games. I don't think Hudson could have made the game they wanted if they didn't have access to that.

Why wouldn't they share code? Fear their own games would be worse? If Nintendo had been freindly to 3rd parties, more/better 3rd party games would have come out on 64, and then there would be better console sales, so even if big N games sold worse % due to competition, the actauly number probably would have been reaised due to an even higher % increase in console sales...

I don't think it was out of fear of quality or competition (competition between Nintendo and 3rd-parties i's just some BS companies came up with to excuse their ignoring the GC). It was likely Yamaguchi falling into his old habit of treating third parties like employees, rather than business partners.

And it wasn't sharing code that made the developers leave. Those that stayed made their own codes, some that even topped Nintendo's (Factor 5). It was the cost of carts, compared to capacity.

Most games on the PS1 could have fit on just two to 3 N64 carts, if a developer was willing to compress the hell out of the data (Residen Evil 2), but the cost would have been horrendous (RE2 came out at the end of the N64's life). There would have been no way Square could sell FFVII at $60. It would have been sold at a loss. So either they would have to sell it for even more than Chrono Trigger sold, or make on the PS1 and sell it for $50, to have a health profit margin.