You are right, the Turoks might be streaming indeed.
Definitely.
Well that's up for opinion but I personally don't care for their 3D platformers at all.
Well that's your opinion, then, but I strongly disagree.
This is the very definition of grasping for straws, you are comparing N64 sales numbers to a catastrophic failure that caused Sega to bow out of the hardware business and a huge disappointment that caused Nintendo to rethink their hardware strategy entirely.
The Dreamcast wasn't a catastrophic failure, though. That would be the 32X and the Saturn. The Dreamcast was definitely a failure, but it was a failure because Sega had backed themselves into a corner because of all the losses they'd piled up on the Saturn and Dreamcast development. They needed the DC to be a massive hit right out of the gate to have any chance at all of staying in the hardware market. It wasn't, because of PS2 hype as much as anything, so they had to give up. Selling 10.5 million systems in such a short time, under so much pressure from the upcoming PS2, is a moderate accomplishment at least, though. But things could have been very different had Sega not messed things up so catastrophically back in '94 through '98
And anyway, I didn't compare N64 sales to just the Dreamcast. I also compared them to Saturn (which sold only 9.5 million worldwide; the Genesis is the only Sega system which sold more than 10-12 million systems), Gamecube, etc.
Oh -- and financially, the Gamecube wasn't a failure either. It was closer to being one than the N64 was, certainly, but they mostly made money off of it.
Let's compare apples to apples, PS1 to N64. 102 million units for the PS1, that's more than three times than what the N64 managed. You also forgot to mention that the N64 sold nearly 20 million less consoles than the SNES, despite the market getting bigger every year at the time.
Worldwide, yes. I was pointing out how in the US things were different, and the N64 sold nearly as well as the SNES had here.
And let's do software too. 962 million units for the PS1, 224 million for the Nintendo 64. The numbers more than speak for themselves.
Worldwide and North America are different. I pointed out how the N64 did do well in North America. It did much worse everywhere else (only 12 million total outside North America, versus 20 million inside), but it did do well here.
As for software sales, price points really should be taken into consideration there, N64 games cost more so of course fewer sold. There were also many times more games released for the PS1 than there were for the N64. N64 games sold better on average as individual titles, as a result.
The N64 didn't really sell well anywhere. If not an outright failure it was a definite disappointment. Nintendo went from market leader to a very, very far second place. It's like arguing that the PS3 was a success for Sony.
No, the N64 did well in the US, particularly from 1996-1999. It did okay in 2000 too, though it faded by the end of the year, and then collapsed very quickly in '01, while the PS1 continued to sell for another four years. Compare N64 to PS1 sales in the US from '95 to '00, and you'd get numbers a lot closer than the final total of 20 to 40-something.
Disappointment, though... perhaps, particularly in Japan. The N64 probably is reasonably considered a disappointment in how it did in Japan. But it was not a failure, and was overall quite profitable.
Sure Nintendo was always profit oriented what Jett maybe don't realize (I name him just because he talked about it a few post above) is that CD alone wouldn't have made a huge difference in software support (especially because the CD drive would have added to the hardware costs).
The big difference between Sony and Sega/Nintendo is that the former viewed itself as a platform provider on which other companies (even small ones) could find success while Sega/Nintendo considered themselves as the big software company that drive the platform adoption all by themselves and let the other developers to create games for it but always under their "strict"rules.
What really hit Sega and Nintendo (with opposite consequences) was a paradigm shift.
Lunga vita al Presidente.
Good point indeed. And yes, even with a CD-based N64, I think that thanks to what you say here and what it means, Sony would still have taken a large part of the market. That third party developers first focus Sony had, with very low fees, drew a lot of attention. CDs or no, Nintendo would never have matched that. And while Square did leave Nintendo in part because of the cart decision, they also had gotten unhappy with Nintendo for other reasons too. There was a general falling-out between the two of them in '96... I think that that'd have been very likely to happen anyway, even with a CD-based N64. But we'll never know that for sure.
Driving up prices of games? That would probably have happened had everyone stuck with carts, but game prices dropped dramatically during the N64 generation. And that didn't happen until the N64 arrived. Sony wasn't willing to lower the retail price of disc games until they saw an opportunity to undercut Nintendo's lowest possible price. Had Nintendo also used CD's, game would've likely stayed $60 all through that gen and the PS2 gen as well.
Sticking with carts was a bad idea for many reasons, but from a game design standpoint, it was the right call. Thankfully, back then Nintendo still thought making the best games was a great strategy.
He obviously forgets what 16-bit game prices were like. But good point on PS1 prices, if not for the higher N64 prices, would Sony have reduced game prices so low?
SSX was HAAAAWT!
I couldn't believe how many polygons I was watching being crunched in realtime, and those bright snazzy particle effects. The only thing close (and it wasn't close) on the DC was Trickstyle.
I liked the texture clarity seen in stuff like Code Veronica and Shenmue, but it was plain as day that the DC was triangle limited compared to the PS2.
I have, of course, also complained repeatedly about DC polygons-per-frame counts -- and yes, they were low, often much closer to 5th gen levels than 6th -- but to be fair, one of the reasons for that was because the system died early. Had the DC lived longer, it could have seen more games pushing several million polygons, at least, as opposed to the sub-one-million polygon counts lots of games have. The system can get up to about 3.2 million polygons before it runs into some hardware limitations, it seems. I don't know if any games get that high, probably not, but Test Drive Le Mans goes higher than most, at least. Had the DC lived longer, we'd probably have seen more like that, and fewer that look like N64 upscales.
I don't think that the DC could ever have competed decently with the Gamecube or Xbox, though. PS2, yes, it's not quite as powerful overall but it's close... but the GC or Xbox? It couldn't have matched them. But had it not died we would have seen better things over time from the DC. Not as good as GC or Xbox graphics, certainly, but better.