Why so many third-parties jumped ship as soon as SONY released the Playstation? This article explains it from a former Capcom guy. Basically carts were a grift by Nintendo to leech extra money off of anyone wanting to publish games on their platforms. Capcoms profits skyrocketed once they started publishing CD games.https://automaton-media.com/en/news/capcom-veteran-says-nintendo-was-the-only-one-making-steady-revenue-from-nes-game-carts-capcoms-profits-really-took-off-with-the-ps1/
>>12620775moneyhats galore
>>12620775>Basically carts were a grift by Nintendo to leech extra money off of anyone wanting to publish games on their platforms.It isn't too hard to understand. Carts cost far more to manufacture, so your profit margins are always going to be more restricted in comparison to CDs. A CD is just a thin piece of plastic with an even thinner layer of basically aluminum foil. It cost only like a dime to manufacture a CD, but in order to manufacture a cartridge it was like a MINIMUM of $15 and could be a lot more even than that if special chips were involved. Plus whatever Nintendo charged on top of that manufacturing cost. But its not like Sony or SEGA would let third parties publish CD games for free either. I don't know what they charged to tell you the truth, but it definitely wasn't free. But whatever it was, it was WITHOUT the ridiculously high manufacturing costs which was unavoidable with cartridges.Aside from the costs, there was also the issue of space. On a CD you have 650 MB or whatever which was a lot for the time. You could do FMV recorded speech, CD quality music, etc. You couldn't really do that with a cartridge now could you? The largest N64 cartridges were 64MB which was still only 1/10th the space of a CD.Nowadays a lot of these issues no longer even apply. Nintendo has switched back to cartridges on the Switch and they're doing fine. It no longer costs a fortune to manufacture carts because chips and stuff are a lot cheaper now than they were in the 90s. Plus storage space is a LOT more massive. A Nintendo Switch cartridge can easily be as large as a Blu-ray disc if it needs to be. Its no longer an issue anymore. But it certainly was back in the 90s.
Yeah, CDs were cheaper to make and Sony asked for a fraction in royalties compared to Nintendo. Nintendo also controlled cartridge production and would prioritize their games even if a 3rd party’s game had to be delayed.
>>12620775>Basically carts were a grift by NintendoAre you retarded?
>>12620797Are you? Nintendo lost a lot of the good faith they had with developers and publishers by sticking with carts and charging absurd royalty fees. A run of CDs could be made quickly, with carts devs had to order a minimum amount.
>>12620809Oh, so you are retarded
>>12620794It doesn't cost as much to manufacture Switch carts because it's using flash that loses data over time instead of actual ROM chips
>>12620823>loses data over timeI hear this a lot. Is it actually true or is it some meme someone made up and people just run with it?
>>12620835Has to be a meme, ive got some dvds burnt from 2006 that still work just fine
>>12620835It is trueBut if you regularly put power through it it should be fine
>>12620816>name calling and no argumentI accept your concession, tendie.
>>12620879Accept away
>>12620835It's 100% true. Flash storage isn't like an EEPROM, it's volatile and requires power. Switch games left sealed in their boxes for 20-30 years will absolutely be blank.I've got plenty of early flash media that has wiped over the past 10-20 years because it was sat in a drawer.
>>12620816Where's the part where you slice your wrists and jump off a bridge? Carts did not help Nintendo
>>12620919I'm surprised you were able to solve the captcha
>>12620775The cheaper alternative to cartridges was cards like Sega and NEC did but they came in small sizes
>>12620835It depends on the format and storage method. EEPROMs use lossless compression, while Flash storage is "lossy". What this means, is that for each year the cart sits in a drawer it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming SanDisk made your cart - it's about 15kbps for Macronix, but only 7kbps on Rohm, due to rotational velocidensity.
>>12620949It amazes me how nowadays the switch 2 has tiny cartridges around the size of these and has 100000x more space on them, I guess you could argue Sega really pioneered this trend first.
>>12620775because Sony paid the big third parties to jump ship, to spite Nintendo for pulling out of the deal they had to develop a CD-based console together.
Cheap CDs also allowed budget releases, like Platinum or whatever on PSX. Couldn't do that with carts. Sony/Sega still controlled manufacturing though, that's why many devs were hopeful for 3DO.
>>12620775>Why so many third-parties jumped ship as soon as SONY released the Playstation?Because video games were becoming too big for Sega and Nintendo, which were associated with kid's games. The US military wanted video games to become simulators to train children to become soldiers. There's also the plan to create a worldwide digital surveillance network, and addictive online video games were a backdoor into people's homes.
>>12620775>Why so many third-parties jumped ship as soon as SONY released the Playstation?Because Nintendo had been pissing off 3rd parties with incredibly restrictive and controlling demands since the NES, while also taking a larger cut. They policed things like the minimum amount of games a publisher could have produced, the maximum amount, were draconian in what they considered offensive yet also vague on what specifically they had issues with, and limited how many games per year a publisher could release or when they could release them, among others. Most publishers played ball because of how big Nintendo was and in many cases was the only game in town, I think they even dinged you for doing multiplatform releases on Nintendo and SEGA systems.Then came Sony with significantly more lax rules and a much much cheaper medium to produce games on, pretty much everyone wanted to jump ship. Nintendo acted like an iron-fisted dictator and as soon as there was another country the devs could just freely migrate to they all set sail.Carts were also becoming extremely restrictive in their size limits by the N64 era, CDs meanwhile majority of games would have to go out of their way to TRY to fill and still would not in most cases. Also helped that for many the PSX was their first CD player. I recall Nintendo insisting the N64 stay a cart-based system was a major reason S-E decided to make their next FF on the PSX instead.>>12620954Nice shitpost>>12620956The Switch doesn't really use cartridges, systems haven't used cartridges in a long time. They are just "cards", and I don't mean their shape. Cartridges were practically the equivalent of installing an expansion card in a PC, they were like installing add-on hardware that directly communicated and in many ways connected to the CPU and video hardware, modern "cards" are just storage, and fundamentally function no differently than if you was loading the game off a CD or HDD.
>>12620775Square wanted to make N64 games. Sony forced them to only make games for the PS1.
>>12623991“Forced them” by having better media and hardware for long ass RPGs with a bigger cut from sales while releasing for cheaper than n64 cartridge games so it could sell more? Real “forcing of the hand” there…Could you imagine FFVII with the limited textures of the n64? I can and it’s not pretty.
>>12620862DVDs aren't flash memory, they're optical.
The rumours are that Nintendo basically treated everyone abysmally and acted like cunts so even their close-knit studios jumped ship at first opportunity.You hear similar things from (some) western studios back then.Also Sony courted the hell out of small game devs whereas Nintendo, despite the impressive library of the SNES, didn't. 'course that all went away after the first playstation.
>>12620775Nintendo were hardcore about they themselves manufacturing the very expensive carts (around $20 each) that you had to pay for upfront and they basically forced you to have a minimum order of something like 10,000 units. And if you only sold 3,000 of those then that was your problem and you were stuck with them. Printing a game to disc even in the 90s would have been a dollar or two at most.
>>12624028N64 has twice the texture cache size, exactly double. However, PS1 had a mechanism that made it easier for developers to stream to the cache.Also PS1 was just the next iteration of an FMV machine. Hence, the RPGs that had mind boggling amounts of FMV. Many of which accounted for beyond 80% of the storage on the media.Of course, I don't blame Sony for that. Sadly consumers just gobbled that crap up. Self absorbed directors wanted to think of themselves as the next Spielberg or some shit.
>>12624242There are start up fees for mastering a CD in the mid 90s but those are in the thousands. Which isn't in accessable by any measure. I don't know if there were restrictions as who could press disks for Sony.
>>12624037Optical flash memory, yes. You have to observe it once in a while for it to retain data.
>>12620794>Nintendo has switched back to cartridges on the Switch and they're doing fine.1. They aren't carts in the same way that 80s and 90s consoles were carts.2. There's local storage and you can just buy digital games and download them. No distinct physical media at all.
>>12623991>Nintendo forced them to only make games for the PS1.Fixed
Whole lotta retards in here that haven't read Game Over.Read Game Over. It's where all this info comes from. It's the source for almost every story about Nintendo in the NES days. It's a major souce for the Tetris story. Just read it.
