Probably would have been a close generation then. The system not being designed around CDs and failing to listen to long time partners is why the N64 was a flop. The twist of the knife that eventually caused Nintendo to flee the home console scene was in declaring a half dozen mediocre western studios to be the premiere partners and the dream team. The rest is history with a 3:1 gap in sales with the new comer.
Maybe that's why the N64 was a flop, but not why the PS1 was a success. It was flooded with appealing games, it caught people's attention from day 1 and it had fairly amazing graphics for the time, at a fairly competitive price. Sony got their shit together since launch to the point where the established brands didn't know what hit them.
This is the same kind of cope segagays have with the saturn and the lies they tell themselves about it.
>N64 was a flop
It sold millions of units.
Flop means failing totally, like Jaguar.
I know, I know, hyperbole and stuff, but still, let's use more appropriate words. It didn't live up to expectations sales-wise, but wasn't a flop.
>64 was a flop
Kek, is this some sort of imaginary world you live in?
It certainly wasn’t as successful as the PS1 sure
The sales were embarassing for a company as big as nintendo.
>Nintendo's fear was, and remains to this day, that anyone besides them would make popular games for their consoles. This is why they've always treated 3rd parties like shit.
They were paranoid of crashing like Atari did
Atari crashed due to the tightening competition in the video game industry, investing too much on the outdated products everyone was bored of (homw arcade experience on the 2600 and 400/800), failing on selling the 5200, and the internal conflicts within the company itself due to the purchase by Warner. It had nothing to do with third parties, the market was just changing and Atari was too young and unfit for a change. In fact, Nintendo didn't learn from most of Atari's failures, but they're literally too big too fail, they have enough time and money to shape their boring outdated products to meet the market demands. Gameboy, wii, switch, and the size of their loyal fanbase itself saved their asses.
Even Japan doesn't have the kind of blind Nintendo fanaticism needed to defend the N64. It was a complete flop. It singlehandedly gave a VCR manufacturer market dominance for the next two decades. Cope and sneed how you will, facts remain facts.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I will never understand the delusion of you anti nintendo fanboys
2 years ago
Anonymous
All you have to understand is that we live in the real world and you do not. In the real world:
1 - The PSX has sold 102m units to the N64's 33m, almost four times the figure, and was the first console to break the three-digit threshold despite Sony having no previous experience whatsoever;
2 - This generation marked the beginning of Sony's near-total domination of the home console market for almost two decades;
3 - The N64 was the culmination of Nintendo's short-term greed and xenophobia catching up to them - hence why it has one of the smallest libraries of any major console at a whopping ~400 games and bled third-party developers to competitors like an open wound. Of those ~400 games, most were notoriously poor quality, hence why the N64 still has the lowest software-to-hardware sales ratio of any Nintendo console.
The Nintendo cult can only offer limp apologetics about the N64 being profitable on paper or selling "millions of units", just like the Wonderswan and the Vita. They don't understand long-term business and neither did Nintendo, which is why they're still a non-factor in the high-end home console market almost thirty years since the N64 flopped.
2 years ago
Anonymous
So in your deluded mind, unless you sold the most, you weren’t successful, got it
I guess selling less than the game boy means that PS1 wasn’t successful, thanks for that enlightening post anon, truly insightful
2 years ago
Anonymous
If the PSX were competing for the same market that the Game Boy was, and if it were being eclipsed four-to-one in worldwide sales, then why not? The irony is that you're the one who's arguing for sales totals being the only barometer of success, you're just too emotionally invested to see it. Do you realise the Gamecube was another flop and that the PS2 was just the PSX squared? Can you piece together why that was?
2 years ago
Anonymous
So the SNES is also a flop in your eyes
My god man, you’re just absolutely off the mark on another level, success and failure mean completely different things to you than anyone else
2 years ago
Anonymous
sounds like a sony homosexual for me.
The PC engine guys from NEC were alwasy better with hardware, just look at the PCFX. Sad that they lost the console war to quick
2 years ago
Anonymous
I'm being called delusional by a poster who resolutely believes the N64 - a console that lost to the Sega Saturn in its country of origin - wasn't a flop. The SNES didn't lose four-fifths of its market share to its competitors. But if you were observant then the cracks in Nintendo's method of business were beginning to show, yes. Their publishing and manufacturing monopoly was only sustainable when they had overwhelming market dominance, like with the NES in North America, or in its handhelds worldwide. I notice you didn't answer my question about the Gamecube. It was also profitable by most accounts and sold 22m in its lifetime. Was it a success?
2 years ago
Anonymous
Remind me again what we were arguing
At what point were we talking about which console was “more” successful?
At which point does making a profit mean it’s a failure?
Maybe you should just stick to the conversation instead of fellating your own delusions
2 years ago
Anonymous
Are you ESL? I can't even tell what you're trying to say. Surprised to see the cult has such a far reach but then stranger things have happened.
I'll try and keep things very, very simple for you.
One: the N64 flopped in all regions of the world save for arguably North America, where it was still outsold two-to-one by the PSX, and;
Two: the N64 was the console that collapsed Nintendo's control over the home console market, never to return to its pre-N64 highs again.
Can you dispute either of these points with reason and not emotional invective? Can you contradict any of the facts I've spoonfed you with yet?
2 years ago
Anonymous
You’ve put a lot of effort into shitposting anon, I’ll commend you there
But you’re dumb as shit for the sole reason you’ve literally posted yourself “save for arguably North America”
You may be the only person on this board that sees success only in passing 100m units sold, I guess congratulations on your autism
Your second point there is extremely laughable and only compounds your delusions on an immense scale
2 years ago
Anonymous
But there's nothing delusional about it. Nintendo has never regained the market share in home consoles that it did in its NES era. That's not a matter of opinion, it's a hard fact. Are cultists immune to reality? Is up down in your bizarre world?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Nintendo has never regained the market share in home consoles that it did in its NES era
remind me again what console came after the gamecube there deluded-kun, remind me of the current console now deluded-kun
please step into reality or shall we move more goalposts to follow your delusions
2 years ago
Anonymous
>the current console now
switch >came after the gamecube there
the wii which had an embarrassing software attach rate and succeeded only as a transient fad before being saturn'd in its last few years.
2 years ago
Anonymous
You are both moronic and you have no idea how business works. "Success" in business is easily equatable to an operations model that produces enough gross profit to account for all expenses and still have enough money to invest in growth. If you have a business that's selling 100m units of a product per year but suffers a net loss, that is not a successful business. On the other hand, a business selling 500k units and making a 20% net profit margin would be a success. Both the PS1 and N64 were successes, they profited. Of course, there are different levels of success; how do we measure the success of a product? Simple, compare total profits. Nintendo and Sony have always had different approaches: Nintendo, for the longest time, designed every console to be sold at a profit from launch, whereas Sony sold consoles at a massive loss (in the case of PS1, it was over $200+ loss on each unit sold at launch due largely to the $150 optical drive), with the intention of selling enough software to compensate. In terms of sheer unit volume, the PS1 trounces the N64 at a more than 3-1 ratio, but remember: profits are what matter. So, which console sold more games? The PS1 has an attach rate of roughly 10, while the N64 has an attach rate of roughly 7. This means that the average owner of either console had 10 or 7 games on those consoles, respectively. Although the PS1's attach rate is higher, we must once again factor in the lossess incured by Sony's console sales model and wager it against the difference in profit between PS1 and N64 software sales. Also, N64 games were $10 more expensive, Nintendo forced publishers to front the cost of manufacturing (and Nintendo owned the plants where the cartridges were produced), and they had no losses on each console sold. Likewise, there's the sheer volume of PS1 titles sold, and the console became significantly cheaper to produce with time. All said, the PS1 probably generated more revenue, but the N64 was still a success.
2 years ago
Anonymous
The N64 had a very low software-to-hardware sales ratio. Not the sort of thing I'd bring up if I were defending the N64 since I've seen figures six or seven times that for the PSX when it comes to lifetime software sales.
2 years ago
Anonymous
the "software-to-hardware" sales ratio wasn't low, the overall software sales were low.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Neither the Wii nor the Switch gave Nintendo the market share it had in the NES era. In fact, the Wii only just outsold the PS3 by a small margin despite the latter being a notoriously weak entry in that generation. Not that it would've helped since its immediate successor in the Wii U was another flop.
You've been wrong at every single turn in this exchange. I don't know what else I can possibly say. This is why I call it a cult. You live in a world where marketing, propaganda and emotional attachment is a substitute for hard fact. The N64 was a successful console because you feel it must've been so. That's where you're at.
2 years ago
Anonymous
the only one attaching emotion here is you deluded-kun, in thinking that 33 million consoles with an attach rate of 7 is somehow a failure
The only Cult like attitude here is yours, where you see success as 100m or more, any less being a failure
2 years ago
Anonymous
YOU are the one who is monomaniacally obsessed with sales figures. I mentioned the ~100m figure because losing that milestone to a VCR manufacturer when you were the former market leader couldn't be more of a perfect demonstration of how badly the N64 bombed.
What part of "market share" is not getting through to you? Which part of, "Could not compete with the Sega Saturn in its home country" is eluding you exactly? Are all ESLs this braindead?
2 years ago
Anonymous
so now it's "Market Share" that determines success and failure is it?
what's going to be the next goalpost we shift to
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Are you -ack!
2 years ago
Anonymous
>invective
you can feel the sweat dripping down this anon's post to prove that yes, he's not an ESL
In fanboy world, anything that isn't #1 is an utter failure. Fanboys have the intellect of a toddler with no capacity for nuance or multiple viewpoints, this is typical of snoy fans.
>N64 was a flop
It sold millions of units.
Flop means failing totally, like Jaguar.
I know, I know, hyperbole and stuff, but still, let's use more appropriate words. It didn't live up to expectations sales-wise, but wasn't a flop.
It sold less than Saturn in Japan. Had Saturn not been gimped overseas who knows how well it could have sold there.
>it caught people's attention from day 1
Not at all. The PS1 was outsold by both 16-bit consoles until 1997. People were very slow to hop on to the new generation of consoles after the total flops the 3DO and Jaguar were. Even it's game library pre and post 97 are vastly different and almost like an entirely different console.
yep, also a lot of people forget N64 was being supported until 2002. everybody thinks 5th gen died with DC and PS2 but there wss a period of time when those consoles were directly competing with 5th gen and even 4th gen systems (e.g. SNES and DC)
It never could have. Who was Nintendo gonna partner up with to provide the tech? Sony? Philips? And how would they get around paying royalties to these two?
It would be years until Panasonic would get the capability to make the semi-custom legally distinct totally-not-DVDs formats that Nintendo ended up using for all their disc-based consoles.
Nintendo already had a partnership with Philips that went on until the Gamecube days. Nintendo's fear of paying $.02 per disc is what lost them the generation, instead paying $10 per PCB+ROM chips minimum. Woops, great strat.
>instead paying $10 per PCB+ROM chips minimum.
they didnt pay anything. they owned the plants where the cartridges were produced and made devs or publishers pay the production cost.
they charged dev/publisher between 30-70% royalty on each game and made them front all production costs on a per unit basis. they were also profitable on each cobsole sold from day 1. they made a killing even with selling 1/3 the units of PS1.
Nintendo's fear was, and remains to this day, that anyone besides them would make popular games for their consoles. This is why they've always treated 3rd parties like shit.
Nintendo's entire business strategy since the NES was to take old, cheap, outdated, hardware, sell it at a very very minor loss, or even a profit, and rake in money off of their own games, and licensing fees.
CDs meant that anyone who wanted to make and distribute a game could very easily, as opposed to how Nintendo operated, which was Nintendo itself deciding the number of carts you can produce, forcing minimum and maximum amounts of them, and making the publisher pay for their creation, meaning whether or not the game sells a single copy, Nintendo makes money. Obviously every 3rd party went to CDs and Nintendo was left to literally have a console with more or less nothing but their own games.
>Nintendo's fear was, and remains to this day, that anyone besides them would make popular games for their consoles. This is why they've always treated 3rd parties like shit.
Atari crashing had nothing to do with 3rd parties.
>CDs meant that anyone who wanted to make and distribute a game could very easily
I'm pretty sure PlayStation games ultimately had to be approved by Sony, same for Saturn games with Sega, they could still ultimately be the gatekeepers for what gets on their console.
And "Cartridge only" doesn't even stop people from making bootleg shit anyways.
Every console, even to this day, has to have games licensed by their parents companies. That's how the console manufacturer would make money, because every console is sold at a loss. The difference is that Nintendo for decades controlled not only the licensing, but the actual manufacturing of the games themselves. If you wanted to make a low budget niche game for the PS1 you got a publishing license, and then made your game. You didn't have to frick around ordering a specific number of discs, or paying Sony upfront before you'd ever sold a single copy. With Nintendo, you had to make a minimum order of around 150-200k carts, you had to pay Nintendo the full production cost for those carts before ever even putting a product on retail, and you could only produce more carts if Nintendo agreed to do it for you. This is why the N64 library is so small, because Nintendo basically forced out anyone who wasn't a AAA company, or in very good relation with them, and why every 3rd party game not fitting those descriptions had a low print run.
>CDs meant that anyone who wanted to make and distribute a game could very easily
I'm pretty sure PlayStation games ultimately had to be approved by Sony, same for Saturn games with Sega, they could still ultimately be the gatekeepers for what gets on their console.
And "Cartridge only" doesn't even stop people from making bootleg shit anyways.
>I'm pretty sure PlayStation games ultimately had to be approved by Sony
This is a generation later, but Sony were the ones who forced breasts to be censored on the PS2 version of BMX XXX (the shitty Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX sequel without his name), while the Gamecube and Xbox versions were uncensored. Sony can be as puritan as Nintendo was in the late 80s.
FFVII might have been on the N64, and it might have crushed the PSX just because of that.
But you still have the problem that Nintendo was always trying to screw over third-party developers. And the N64 GPU is more complicated compared to the PS1 GPU. So who knows.
So tired of the “Sega of America wuz kangz” meme. Kalinske was a piece of shit and I’m not even talking Stolar. Americans are always like this. Damn tiring.
N64 pushed 2x as many polys as PS1. there is literally nothing graphically impressive about FF7 that N64 couldn't have done. the only issue was storage limitations from cartridge format that would necessitate FMVs, backgrounds, audio etc. to be compressed or cut. otherwise N64 is a vastly more powerful machine and would have no issue running FF7 or anything else on PS1 for that matter.
>there is literally nothing graphically impressive about FF7 that N64 couldn't have done
There's a lot that couldn't be done, the N64 did not push as many polygons and had too many restrictions which ultimately hurt performance so on paper comparisons are of no value.
In reality: I got my N64 on launch day 1st March 1997.
In this fantasy of a CD-Based N64: I would have waited to see how loading times were like. I would not have blindly purchased sight unseen as I did in the real world.
I had been burned by the Playstation 1 prior to this date. Loading times felt like eternity when playing a Playstation in 1996 at a department store.
Die Hard Trilogy at a department store was the game that destroyed my world-view of CD-based systems.
Power ON.
Dumb Sony Playstation logo takes like 20 seconds. Wait, this thing boots like a computer?
Then a simple text-based "now loading please wait" for maybe 20 seconds.
That loaded an animated-cutscene-video "NOW LOADING" in a fiery-themed fashion. 20-30 more seconds.
Now at title screen. Mash the start button in frustration, because no console has ever been this long already.
Fiery "now loading" for 15-20 seconds.
Game starts.
What options did I miss? What is this? What's happening? Oh shit. I'm dead. Game over.
LOADING!
If the controller was not chained down, it would be thrown!
Kid behind me wants a turn.
Give up.
CD's are stupid. Loading times are meant for computers and they have Hard Drives!
If the N64 had been announced to have CD's after I experienced this, wow! How the mighty Nintendo has fallen!
In a world that people were forcing themselves to endure load times on the Neo Geo CD purely for a chance to play the good games at home, the loading time cope will never fail to make me laugh.
Very fast, metal gear solid load times on N64 are.
The reason Nintendo failed isn't because of the technology, although it certainly didn't help. It's because the top brass were and still are micromanaging untrustworthy buttholes who have an animal farm attitude towards other developers.
Sony by contrast could not give less of a shit and would let you publish literally anything, they'd even help you in doing so. That's why everyone who had a PSX always has "that" game which is just some random obscure title they recall fondly. So just use your common sense and think how stacked that generation ended up being:
PSX
-Massive freedom
-Embracing the newest consumer-grade data storage meant an order of magnitude more space for game content like pre-rendered videos, live music or even film clips
-Broad appeal both to children and older teens/young adults
-Doubles as a quick CD player
N64
-Closed box with stock microcode making it a pain in the ass to write for
-Severe memory issues
-Carebear kiddy console image
-All devs are equal but some cough cough EAD are more equal than others
If I were a small or mid-sized studio I wouldn't touch slimeball Nintendo with a bargepole. You couldn't pay me to work for them. Would you want to waste your career porting RE2 to a cartridge because some powertripping jap thinks it's funny? If it weren't for Pokémon there's a very good chance they'd be making playing cards instead of consoles right now.
homosexual zoomies would be shitting up the board with "what if N64 used carts" threads. They're literally incapable of not shitting things up with their hot contrarian takes.
The secret truth is that the N64 was poorly designed beyond just the issue of using cartridges. If everything else stayed the same except for having a CD-ROM drive, it would have been an even bigger frick-up.
Definitely this. The cart was integral to getting decent texture performance out of the system. If it was CD based then everything would be bottlenecked by the RAM bandwidth/latency and it would be even harder to keep pace with the playstation for polygon throughput. Sure, Nintendo could have made separate uncontended RAM for this purpose, but then, they could have done that with the cart version too and they didn't.
It would have hurt badly game design, since the early cd rom drives read data 100 times slower than with huge latencys, why do you think so many ps1 games used pre rendered and midi audio ?
Cartridge made possible the huge levels of N64 games , most importantly it allowed dynamic music to be played on the fly , randomicaly generated data and it could be used as extra RAM , just like the Indianda Jones and the infernal machine did.
Star Wars Battle for Naboo could put up to 3000 particles of snow on screen with large levels and impressive draw distance alongside with real surround music , those games could never be done with tiny low disc reading bandwidth.
Opted for carts because loading and disc switching would have killed the immersive experience in some games. The Zelda titles would have been a fricking DRAG.
just look at the satellaview's games that had loading times, now that but with snes cd, it might have been bad but hey also fricking based. Imagine a world where we got snes cd with a cd version of fricking god tier Terranigma.
It wouldn't have been as special though. It would have been two times more powerful than PS1 but then the games wouldn't have been the same as what we got. There is too much variables here to discuss in one post and most people don't read long posts so I won't even get into it. Things worked out a lot better with N64 being yet another cartridge based console.
A what if I would have liked even more for myself was Saturn being a 32bit 2D exclusive machine or mostly 2D exclusive. Perhaps it could have even been a hybrid console with CD's and cartridges. Maybe think of it as a successor to the Sega CD and Genesis directly with backwards compatibility. I know that everyone wanted to chase 3D at the time but since you are giving a what if scenario I am just giving a scenario I would have liked myself. Having these three consoles all out simultaneously all doing their own unique things would have made 5th gen of gaming even better to me. Instead we got a strong N64 and PS1 but a weak Saturn in the US. A console that was pretty much just a PS1-ish. Yeah it did things like 2D better but the console was still primarily focused on pushing 3D and still flopped huge in the US.
>tldr
I'd prefer if Saturn was a 2D console that pumped out tons of even better 2D games then it did so we all then could have had 3 amazing unique consoles all doing their own thing.
It would be much worse then.
I remember hating any time we went over to the playstation kid's house and had to spend 3/4 of the time watching loading screens.
Probably would have been a close generation then. The system not being designed around CDs and failing to listen to long time partners is why the N64 was a flop. The twist of the knife that eventually caused Nintendo to flee the home console scene was in declaring a half dozen mediocre western studios to be the premiere partners and the dream team. The rest is history with a 3:1 gap in sales with the new comer.
Maybe that's why the N64 was a flop, but not why the PS1 was a success. It was flooded with appealing games, it caught people's attention from day 1 and it had fairly amazing graphics for the time, at a fairly competitive price. Sony got their shit together since launch to the point where the established brands didn't know what hit them.
This is the same kind of cope segagays have with the saturn and the lies they tell themselves about it.
>N64 was a flop
It sold millions of units.
Flop means failing totally, like Jaguar.
I know, I know, hyperbole and stuff, but still, let's use more appropriate words. It didn't live up to expectations sales-wise, but wasn't a flop.
The sales were embarassing for a company as big as nintendo.
Atari crashed due to the tightening competition in the video game industry, investing too much on the outdated products everyone was bored of (homw arcade experience on the 2600 and 400/800), failing on selling the 5200, and the internal conflicts within the company itself due to the purchase by Warner. It had nothing to do with third parties, the market was just changing and Atari was too young and unfit for a change. In fact, Nintendo didn't learn from most of Atari's failures, but they're literally too big too fail, they have enough time and money to shape their boring outdated products to meet the market demands. Gameboy, wii, switch, and the size of their loyal fanbase itself saved their asses.
>The sales were embarassing for a company as big as nintendo.
I wish you c**ts would stop with the history revisionism
Even Japan doesn't have the kind of blind Nintendo fanaticism needed to defend the N64. It was a complete flop. It singlehandedly gave a VCR manufacturer market dominance for the next two decades. Cope and sneed how you will, facts remain facts.
I will never understand the delusion of you anti nintendo fanboys
All you have to understand is that we live in the real world and you do not. In the real world:
1 - The PSX has sold 102m units to the N64's 33m, almost four times the figure, and was the first console to break the three-digit threshold despite Sony having no previous experience whatsoever;
2 - This generation marked the beginning of Sony's near-total domination of the home console market for almost two decades;
3 - The N64 was the culmination of Nintendo's short-term greed and xenophobia catching up to them - hence why it has one of the smallest libraries of any major console at a whopping ~400 games and bled third-party developers to competitors like an open wound. Of those ~400 games, most were notoriously poor quality, hence why the N64 still has the lowest software-to-hardware sales ratio of any Nintendo console.
The Nintendo cult can only offer limp apologetics about the N64 being profitable on paper or selling "millions of units", just like the Wonderswan and the Vita. They don't understand long-term business and neither did Nintendo, which is why they're still a non-factor in the high-end home console market almost thirty years since the N64 flopped.
So in your deluded mind, unless you sold the most, you weren’t successful, got it
I guess selling less than the game boy means that PS1 wasn’t successful, thanks for that enlightening post anon, truly insightful
If the PSX were competing for the same market that the Game Boy was, and if it were being eclipsed four-to-one in worldwide sales, then why not? The irony is that you're the one who's arguing for sales totals being the only barometer of success, you're just too emotionally invested to see it. Do you realise the Gamecube was another flop and that the PS2 was just the PSX squared? Can you piece together why that was?
So the SNES is also a flop in your eyes
My god man, you’re just absolutely off the mark on another level, success and failure mean completely different things to you than anyone else
sounds like a sony homosexual for me.
The PC engine guys from NEC were alwasy better with hardware, just look at the PCFX. Sad that they lost the console war to quick
I'm being called delusional by a poster who resolutely believes the N64 - a console that lost to the Sega Saturn in its country of origin - wasn't a flop. The SNES didn't lose four-fifths of its market share to its competitors. But if you were observant then the cracks in Nintendo's method of business were beginning to show, yes. Their publishing and manufacturing monopoly was only sustainable when they had overwhelming market dominance, like with the NES in North America, or in its handhelds worldwide. I notice you didn't answer my question about the Gamecube. It was also profitable by most accounts and sold 22m in its lifetime. Was it a success?
Remind me again what we were arguing
At what point were we talking about which console was “more” successful?
At which point does making a profit mean it’s a failure?
Maybe you should just stick to the conversation instead of fellating your own delusions
Are you ESL? I can't even tell what you're trying to say. Surprised to see the cult has such a far reach but then stranger things have happened.
I'll try and keep things very, very simple for you.
One: the N64 flopped in all regions of the world save for arguably North America, where it was still outsold two-to-one by the PSX, and;
Two: the N64 was the console that collapsed Nintendo's control over the home console market, never to return to its pre-N64 highs again.
Can you dispute either of these points with reason and not emotional invective? Can you contradict any of the facts I've spoonfed you with yet?
You’ve put a lot of effort into shitposting anon, I’ll commend you there
But you’re dumb as shit for the sole reason you’ve literally posted yourself “save for arguably North America”
You may be the only person on this board that sees success only in passing 100m units sold, I guess congratulations on your autism
Your second point there is extremely laughable and only compounds your delusions on an immense scale
But there's nothing delusional about it. Nintendo has never regained the market share in home consoles that it did in its NES era. That's not a matter of opinion, it's a hard fact. Are cultists immune to reality? Is up down in your bizarre world?
>Nintendo has never regained the market share in home consoles that it did in its NES era
remind me again what console came after the gamecube there deluded-kun, remind me of the current console now deluded-kun
please step into reality or shall we move more goalposts to follow your delusions
>the current console now
switch
>came after the gamecube there
the wii which had an embarrassing software attach rate and succeeded only as a transient fad before being saturn'd in its last few years.
You are both moronic and you have no idea how business works. "Success" in business is easily equatable to an operations model that produces enough gross profit to account for all expenses and still have enough money to invest in growth. If you have a business that's selling 100m units of a product per year but suffers a net loss, that is not a successful business. On the other hand, a business selling 500k units and making a 20% net profit margin would be a success. Both the PS1 and N64 were successes, they profited. Of course, there are different levels of success; how do we measure the success of a product? Simple, compare total profits. Nintendo and Sony have always had different approaches: Nintendo, for the longest time, designed every console to be sold at a profit from launch, whereas Sony sold consoles at a massive loss (in the case of PS1, it was over $200+ loss on each unit sold at launch due largely to the $150 optical drive), with the intention of selling enough software to compensate. In terms of sheer unit volume, the PS1 trounces the N64 at a more than 3-1 ratio, but remember: profits are what matter. So, which console sold more games? The PS1 has an attach rate of roughly 10, while the N64 has an attach rate of roughly 7. This means that the average owner of either console had 10 or 7 games on those consoles, respectively. Although the PS1's attach rate is higher, we must once again factor in the lossess incured by Sony's console sales model and wager it against the difference in profit between PS1 and N64 software sales. Also, N64 games were $10 more expensive, Nintendo forced publishers to front the cost of manufacturing (and Nintendo owned the plants where the cartridges were produced), and they had no losses on each console sold. Likewise, there's the sheer volume of PS1 titles sold, and the console became significantly cheaper to produce with time. All said, the PS1 probably generated more revenue, but the N64 was still a success.
The N64 had a very low software-to-hardware sales ratio. Not the sort of thing I'd bring up if I were defending the N64 since I've seen figures six or seven times that for the PSX when it comes to lifetime software sales.
the "software-to-hardware" sales ratio wasn't low, the overall software sales were low.
Neither the Wii nor the Switch gave Nintendo the market share it had in the NES era. In fact, the Wii only just outsold the PS3 by a small margin despite the latter being a notoriously weak entry in that generation. Not that it would've helped since its immediate successor in the Wii U was another flop.
You've been wrong at every single turn in this exchange. I don't know what else I can possibly say. This is why I call it a cult. You live in a world where marketing, propaganda and emotional attachment is a substitute for hard fact. The N64 was a successful console because you feel it must've been so. That's where you're at.
the only one attaching emotion here is you deluded-kun, in thinking that 33 million consoles with an attach rate of 7 is somehow a failure
The only Cult like attitude here is yours, where you see success as 100m or more, any less being a failure
YOU are the one who is monomaniacally obsessed with sales figures. I mentioned the ~100m figure because losing that milestone to a VCR manufacturer when you were the former market leader couldn't be more of a perfect demonstration of how badly the N64 bombed.
What part of "market share" is not getting through to you? Which part of, "Could not compete with the Sega Saturn in its home country" is eluding you exactly? Are all ESLs this braindead?
so now it's "Market Share" that determines success and failure is it?
what's going to be the next goalpost we shift to
>Are you -ack!
>invective
you can feel the sweat dripping down this anon's post to prove that yes, he's not an ESL
>64 was a flop
Kek, is this some sort of imaginary world you live in?
It certainly wasn’t as successful as the PS1 sure
In fanboy world, anything that isn't #1 is an utter failure. Fanboys have the intellect of a toddler with no capacity for nuance or multiple viewpoints, this is typical of snoy fans.
Maybe he lives in nippon, the N64 was third behind Saturn there
Yeah, although software-wise, n64 sold more.
It sold less than Saturn in Japan. Had Saturn not been gimped overseas who knows how well it could have sold there.
barely, but that is irrelevant on the global sales
who gives a frick about the saturn?
>it caught people's attention from day 1
Not at all. The PS1 was outsold by both 16-bit consoles until 1997. People were very slow to hop on to the new generation of consoles after the total flops the 3DO and Jaguar were. Even it's game library pre and post 97 are vastly different and almost like an entirely different console.
yep, also a lot of people forget N64 was being supported until 2002. everybody thinks 5th gen died with DC and PS2 but there wss a period of time when those consoles were directly competing with 5th gen and even 4th gen systems (e.g. SNES and DC)
>flee the home console scene
*Wii and Switch laughs in your Gankertard Gankerirgin face
Square will never make a premiere title on nintendo ever again, sorry.
>caring about modern games
Oh no, how will we recover on this board exclusively for retro games
It never could have. Who was Nintendo gonna partner up with to provide the tech? Sony? Philips? And how would they get around paying royalties to these two?
It would be years until Panasonic would get the capability to make the semi-custom legally distinct totally-not-DVDs formats that Nintendo ended up using for all their disc-based consoles.
>It never could have
yes it could. just like sega did
Nintendo already had a partnership with Philips that went on until the Gamecube days. Nintendo's fear of paying $.02 per disc is what lost them the generation, instead paying $10 per PCB+ROM chips minimum. Woops, great strat.
>instead paying $10 per PCB+ROM chips minimum.
they didnt pay anything. they owned the plants where the cartridges were produced and made devs or publishers pay the production cost.
they paid for materials, employees, production, it all has a cost tied to it. Nintendo was still buying chips from toshiba, MX, etc.
they charged dev/publisher between 30-70% royalty on each game and made them front all production costs on a per unit basis. they were also profitable on each cobsole sold from day 1. they made a killing even with selling 1/3 the units of PS1.
all huge mistakes that could have been avoided.
Nintendo's fear was, and remains to this day, that anyone besides them would make popular games for their consoles. This is why they've always treated 3rd parties like shit.
Nintendo's entire business strategy since the NES was to take old, cheap, outdated, hardware, sell it at a very very minor loss, or even a profit, and rake in money off of their own games, and licensing fees.
CDs meant that anyone who wanted to make and distribute a game could very easily, as opposed to how Nintendo operated, which was Nintendo itself deciding the number of carts you can produce, forcing minimum and maximum amounts of them, and making the publisher pay for their creation, meaning whether or not the game sells a single copy, Nintendo makes money. Obviously every 3rd party went to CDs and Nintendo was left to literally have a console with more or less nothing but their own games.
>Nintendo's fear was, and remains to this day, that anyone besides them would make popular games for their consoles. This is why they've always treated 3rd parties like shit.
They were paranoid of crashing like Atari did
Atari crashing had nothing to do with 3rd parties.
Every console, even to this day, has to have games licensed by their parents companies. That's how the console manufacturer would make money, because every console is sold at a loss. The difference is that Nintendo for decades controlled not only the licensing, but the actual manufacturing of the games themselves. If you wanted to make a low budget niche game for the PS1 you got a publishing license, and then made your game. You didn't have to frick around ordering a specific number of discs, or paying Sony upfront before you'd ever sold a single copy. With Nintendo, you had to make a minimum order of around 150-200k carts, you had to pay Nintendo the full production cost for those carts before ever even putting a product on retail, and you could only produce more carts if Nintendo agreed to do it for you. This is why the N64 library is so small, because Nintendo basically forced out anyone who wasn't a AAA company, or in very good relation with them, and why every 3rd party game not fitting those descriptions had a low print run.
>CDs meant that anyone who wanted to make and distribute a game could very easily
I'm pretty sure PlayStation games ultimately had to be approved by Sony, same for Saturn games with Sega, they could still ultimately be the gatekeepers for what gets on their console.
And "Cartridge only" doesn't even stop people from making bootleg shit anyways.
>akshually
shut up idiot. you knew what he meant. god i hate nincels
>I'm pretty sure PlayStation games ultimately had to be approved by Sony
This is a generation later, but Sony were the ones who forced breasts to be censored on the PS2 version of BMX XXX (the shitty Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX sequel without his name), while the Gamecube and Xbox versions were uncensored. Sony can be as puritan as Nintendo was in the late 80s.
>Sony?
yes
FFVII might have been on the N64, and it might have crushed the PSX just because of that.
But you still have the problem that Nintendo was always trying to screw over third-party developers. And the N64 GPU is more complicated compared to the PS1 GPU. So who knows.
It would have had a lot of boring games with 5 minute load times, just like the Playstation.
>moviegames
>Black person music
>loading
If SEGA made the Hitachi & Silicon Graphics system SEGA America wanted. We would have had a N64 with CD drive.
But if OP never, considered this then OP is very new.
So tired of the “Sega of America wuz kangz” meme. Kalinske was a piece of shit and I’m not even talking Stolar. Americans are always like this. Damn tiring.
>Americans are always like this.
america has many good people. the term you're looking for is "jews"
Sega of Japan sabotaged Sega because gaijin were dominating the international market and it made them seethe.
American chads are always right and dominate your headspace RENT FREE. Stay tired pussy.
The Silicon Graphics pursued Nintendo after Sega dropped it. I don't care about your Sega of America issues. This is a fact.
and the n64 ended up being the worst looking and worst performing console of its generation. Smart move that was.
Interesting facts you got there.
thanks, learned it from this guy
Umm maybe you shouldn't use punctuation if you don't know how to.
Does it still have vaseline filter?
It wins jap, probably doesn't invest the dollars for final fantasy marketing campaign so it's a flop in the US and we lose out on alot of good jrpgs
I imagine a game like xenogears would be impossible on a Nintendo console
the hard truth is the n64 is still not going to be powerful enough to run games like ff7. storage and performance were the issues, not just storage.
N64 pushed 2x as many polys as PS1. there is literally nothing graphically impressive about FF7 that N64 couldn't have done. the only issue was storage limitations from cartridge format that would necessitate FMVs, backgrounds, audio etc. to be compressed or cut. otherwise N64 is a vastly more powerful machine and would have no issue running FF7 or anything else on PS1 for that matter.
>there is literally nothing graphically impressive about FF7 that N64 couldn't have done
There's a lot that couldn't be done, the N64 did not push as many polygons and had too many restrictions which ultimately hurt performance so on paper comparisons are of no value.
Doubtful
It also ran at like 15 fps
better than most n64 games.
Not an argument
Facts are not to be argued.
Of course they are, however you posted an opinion
Objective, observable reality disagrees.
No, that's just your subjective opinion - and that's all it will ever be. Get the frick off of this board, child.
What if bingbing wahoos had more texture cache than a Vic20?
FMVs, loading times and I assume less compressed textures.
Nintendo gets 2nd place instead of 3rd.
I don't think Nintendo would have dethroned the Playstation even with CDs. Sony had too much money to burn on advertising.
Man, back when Sony knew how to design consumer electronics. Gorgeous
It would have had load times
In reality: I got my N64 on launch day 1st March 1997.
In this fantasy of a CD-Based N64: I would have waited to see how loading times were like. I would not have blindly purchased sight unseen as I did in the real world.
I had been burned by the Playstation 1 prior to this date. Loading times felt like eternity when playing a Playstation in 1996 at a department store.
Die Hard Trilogy at a department store was the game that destroyed my world-view of CD-based systems.
Power ON.
Dumb Sony Playstation logo takes like 20 seconds. Wait, this thing boots like a computer?
Then a simple text-based "now loading please wait" for maybe 20 seconds.
That loaded an animated-cutscene-video "NOW LOADING" in a fiery-themed fashion. 20-30 more seconds.
Now at title screen. Mash the start button in frustration, because no console has ever been this long already.
Fiery "now loading" for 15-20 seconds.
Game starts.
What options did I miss? What is this? What's happening? Oh shit. I'm dead. Game over.
LOADING!
If the controller was not chained down, it would be thrown!
Kid behind me wants a turn.
Give up.
CD's are stupid. Loading times are meant for computers and they have Hard Drives!
If the N64 had been announced to have CD's after I experienced this, wow! How the mighty Nintendo has fallen!
Just watched a lets play of that game.
1 full minute (almost to the second) after the Sony Playstation logo stuff.
To a super Nintendo kid with people waiting behind them, yeah, that's BAD!
In a world that people were forcing themselves to endure load times on the Neo Geo CD purely for a chance to play the good games at home, the loading time cope will never fail to make me laugh.
Very fast, metal gear solid load times on N64 are.
The reason Nintendo failed isn't because of the technology, although it certainly didn't help. It's because the top brass were and still are micromanaging untrustworthy buttholes who have an animal farm attitude towards other developers.
Sony by contrast could not give less of a shit and would let you publish literally anything, they'd even help you in doing so. That's why everyone who had a PSX always has "that" game which is just some random obscure title they recall fondly. So just use your common sense and think how stacked that generation ended up being:
PSX
-Massive freedom
-Embracing the newest consumer-grade data storage meant an order of magnitude more space for game content like pre-rendered videos, live music or even film clips
-Broad appeal both to children and older teens/young adults
-Doubles as a quick CD player
N64
-Closed box with stock microcode making it a pain in the ass to write for
-Severe memory issues
-Carebear kiddy console image
-All devs are equal but some cough cough EAD are more equal than others
If I were a small or mid-sized studio I wouldn't touch slimeball Nintendo with a bargepole. You couldn't pay me to work for them. Would you want to waste your career porting RE2 to a cartridge because some powertripping jap thinks it's funny? If it weren't for Pokémon there's a very good chance they'd be making playing cards instead of consoles right now.
Loading…
I don't like load times at all and only play cartridge consoles also emulation is gay
homosexual zoomies would be shitting up the board with "what if N64 used carts" threads. They're literally incapable of not shitting things up with their hot contrarian takes.
mindbroken as frick
The secret truth is that the N64 was poorly designed beyond just the issue of using cartridges. If everything else stayed the same except for having a CD-ROM drive, it would have been an even bigger frick-up.
Definitely this. The cart was integral to getting decent texture performance out of the system. If it was CD based then everything would be bottlenecked by the RAM bandwidth/latency and it would be even harder to keep pace with the playstation for polygon throughput. Sure, Nintendo could have made separate uncontended RAM for this purpose, but then, they could have done that with the cart version too and they didn't.
nah the only problem with the console was the RAM
If games actually properly used the expansion pak RAM then it would've been fine
>OoT with loading screens at every entrance
Sounds kino.
What is the PlayStation used CD-RAM?
Doesn't matter, the small texture RAM and awful architecture would remain.
You dumb. If used cd rom, they can add more RAM.
Also updates to 16kb-24kb of texture patch too. MVG knew that.
Sin and Punishment would have high bitrate audio
It would have been based like thePC Engine conole which also had CD ROM
CTR is light years better than MK64 although I think Diddy Kong is the best of the three. MK64 is the game equivalent of chewing on wet cardboard.
identified.
this picture is so dumb.
>analog control good
>digital control bad
cope.
I prefer the 64 and even I think this image is fricking autistic
good.
It would have hurt badly game design, since the early cd rom drives read data 100 times slower than with huge latencys, why do you think so many ps1 games used pre rendered and midi audio ?
Cartridge made possible the huge levels of N64 games , most importantly it allowed dynamic music to be played on the fly , randomicaly generated data and it could be used as extra RAM , just like the Indianda Jones and the infernal machine did.
Star Wars Battle for Naboo could put up to 3000 particles of snow on screen with large levels and impressive draw distance alongside with real surround music , those games could never be done with tiny low disc reading bandwidth.
Too many people are aware of cartridge shortcomings while having no idea what cd shortcomings were
I want drag his lazy bumps to fixed both Castlevania 64 and Deadly Arts.
Nintendo 64 still work unlike the piece of trash PS
works on my machine
It didn't even have an audio processor, the CPU had to do it all.
Very laggy RAM too.
Opted for carts because loading and disc switching would have killed the immersive experience in some games. The Zelda titles would have been a fricking DRAG.
just look at the satellaview's games that had loading times, now that but with snes cd, it might have been bad but hey also fricking based. Imagine a world where we got snes cd with a cd version of fricking god tier Terranigma.
>this late
What if N64 use CPS-III low cost arcade hardware and zip based cart media?
It wouldn't have been as special though. It would have been two times more powerful than PS1 but then the games wouldn't have been the same as what we got. There is too much variables here to discuss in one post and most people don't read long posts so I won't even get into it. Things worked out a lot better with N64 being yet another cartridge based console.
A what if I would have liked even more for myself was Saturn being a 32bit 2D exclusive machine or mostly 2D exclusive. Perhaps it could have even been a hybrid console with CD's and cartridges. Maybe think of it as a successor to the Sega CD and Genesis directly with backwards compatibility. I know that everyone wanted to chase 3D at the time but since you are giving a what if scenario I am just giving a scenario I would have liked myself. Having these three consoles all out simultaneously all doing their own unique things would have made 5th gen of gaming even better to me. Instead we got a strong N64 and PS1 but a weak Saturn in the US. A console that was pretty much just a PS1-ish. Yeah it did things like 2D better but the console was still primarily focused on pushing 3D and still flopped huge in the US.
>tldr
I'd prefer if Saturn was a 2D console that pumped out tons of even better 2D games then it did so we all then could have had 3 amazing unique consoles all doing their own thing.
It would be much worse then.
I remember hating any time we went over to the playstation kid's house and had to spend 3/4 of the time watching loading screens.