N64 was a failure everywhere except america. N64 sold 30 million during its life. 20 million was from america. Why was n64 only ever popular in america? For reference snes sold similar number in america
Americans could afford expensive cartridges. Poorfag countries bought burnt ps1 discs
Have you seen NA covers? They have a...particular view of artistry. They love low brow entertainment, and N64 gave them just that.
>>12708894Americans are brand loyalists first and foremost. If you're not loyal to [brand] then you must be a communist.
Most of dreamcast sales were in america too. I think 4 controller ports was a big deal for college dorms
>>12708907They didn't buy saturn
>>12708894cartridges were familiar techperfect for brainlet american midwitsone of my friends had one of those ps1 boot discs with the special spring you had to use to play japanese discs and it was the craziest thing i'd ever seen, shit looked like rocket science to me
>>12708915Sega didn't have the deep market penetration (aka rape) that Nintendo enjoyed for several years even before the Genesis was a thing. Nintendo did well in cultivating a mass follow and making it seem like they were an American company more than Japanese. Americans basically were exposed to the Sega brand for very little time preceding the Saturn, compared to the relentless Nintendo presence since 1985, and because Nintendo didn't have any serious fuckups (VB doesn't count as most people didn't know of its existence) unlike Sega, people had high hopes for the N64 so they blindly bought 20m units.
>>12708894>N64 was a failure everywhere except america. N64 sold 30 million during its life. 20 million was from america. Why was n64 only ever popular in america? For reference snes sold similar number in americaProbably because unlike Japan, Americans didn't really care too much about the lack of RPGs on this system. Also Super Mario 64 was a big deal in America and seen as revolutionary. That game did a lot to whip up hype in the early days.One thing that doesn't make sense though is why Nintendo only released the 64DD in Japan when as you pointed out the N64 sold by far more in America than it did in Japan. It seems if the 64DD could only come out in one place then America should have been it. The 64DD would have had a far better chance of succeeding here.
>>1270892564dd sold so incredibly bad in japan I think they just gave up. Definitely a poor decision to not release it in your primary market that gen. Sega saturn and n64 sold about equal in japan. Ps1 owned that gen in japan
>>12708894Only Americans play brain dead easy children games
I think there's a strong overlap between how easy it was to pirate on a console and how successful it was
>>12708934>64dd sold so incredibly bad in japan I think they just gave up. Definitely a poor decision to not release it in your primary market that gen.Well, Nintendo is a Japanese company after all. So I can kinda understand putting your home market first out of patriotism or whatever. But companies are in the business of making money and if there's more money to be made in the American market then they should have put greater priority on it for that reason, but they didn't.Don't forget the N64 also released first in Japan before NA or anywhere else. That was also the case with the Gamecube. But the Wii and Wii U came out in NA before Japan. I guess Nintendo finally realized that NA is a larger market so this is more important than patriotism. But it took them a long time before they learned it.
>>12708951>guess Nintendo finally realized that NA is a larger marketOnly reason n64 and too a lesser extent gamecube weren't total failures was because of the na market. The og xbox kinda stole the gamecubes thunder in na and is probably part of the reason nintendo decided to start doing weirdo shit
>>12708964Going off of library quality, PSX should've outsold N64 tenfoldLike it did everywhere else except the US
>>12708894Americans had friends.
>>12708969>Going off of library qualityThe N64 had a quality library. It unfortunately just didn't have a quantity library.
>>12708974>The N64 had a quality libraryUtter nonsense that can only be heard from an American.
This is how I imagine anyone still insisting N64 wasn't a giant pile of shit in 2026.
>>12708936Dreamcast
>>12708910Nonono you're ONLY allowed to single out the N64.
>>12708907Oh that’s why Americans switched from Atari to Nintendo and the PSX outsold the N64?You’re FUCKING WRONG and OBSESSED you dumbshit.
>>12708894I didn’t fall for itI knew it sucked back then tooOther than f zero 007 and maybe 1 other game
>>12708910PSX dominated the college dorms.
>>12708915Because Sega wasn't actually that popular on it's own merits. The only reason people gave them the time of day was because Nintendo was the most popular and famous video game company in the country. No one had a master system or TG16 it wasn't until Genesis marketed itself as "Nintendo for rebels" or whatever they really got popular but as shown by it's sales it was more of a fashion statement than actual fans. People bought the Genesis so they could say "yeah I'm not one of those fags who has Nintendo" I doubt they even had more than 5 games for the system if they even played it. Shame too because all that money let Sega produce some good ass games, they were all overshadowed by the made up console wars. No one wanted a Saturn because Sony took up the torch and blazed a trail to steal the crown. They had all the benefits of being the rebels choice (and being cheap as fuck). This is to say nothing of the quality or quantity of games for the systems, because quite frankly outside of the mascot titles none of them mattered at all. People bought these things to join a fad.
By 1995 only Americans had money to afford cartridge games.
>>12708904the NA art mogs the eastoid slop
>>12708935>brain dead easy children gamesyou're the expert
im adult bri'ish psx gameri haet nintendersimple as
>>12709279Americans are so much smarter than your ethnicity.
>>12708894BASED America not only inventing videogames but also keeping the industry alive. American Culture is so cool.
Is this the low quality burgenistan circlejerking thread? Or the usual auster garbage?
>>12708894>lets make this decently strong hardware>the max size for games? well snes games were only a couple mb so lets make it 64 mb that should be enoughwhat were they fucking thinking?
>>12708894Nintendo didn't/doesn't have the distribution capabilities that Sony does when it comes to the global markets like in any European country smaller than PolandAs for Japan, have a look at the N64 library they had. N64 had a little under 400 games total of which less than 300 saw an US release and around 200 saw a Japanese release. This means their N64 library looked vastly different than yours, specifically when it comes to third party games.
There weren't a ton of good games but there was a handful of extremely good ones, namely mario kart, super mario, starfox, goldeneye, rogue squadron and ocarina of time. I played and replayed each of these dozens of times.Ps1 had many more good games but fewer extremely good ones, and was way more focused on single player.
>>12708935>Only Americans play brain dead easy children gamesI think you mean, "only Americans could afford to buy games for their children at that time"
>>12708894I just wish we would have gotten the 64DD.
>>12708894>Sega Saturn sold 5.8 million units in Japan>/vr/ says it was a hit in the country >Nintendo 64 sells 5.5 million units in Japan>/vr/ says it was a massive failure in the countryWhy does this board seethe so hard over Nintendo?
>>12709508tendo tendo man
>>12709507>I just wish we would have gotten the 64DD.nobody wanted it>>12709508>/vr/ says it was a massive failure in the countryPlayStation: 19,411,000 (Japan) (figure from 2005)N64: 5,540,000 (figure from March 2008)lol>Why does this board seethe so hard over Nintendo?lolcow schizo, everyone. btfo in yet another thread.
>>12709391>auster derangement syndromelol lmao
>>12709508Who the fuck says Saturd was a hit in Japan? People bought it to play Virtua Fighter and nothing else.
>>12709508Gokiburi resent that people would rather discuss Mario 64 instead of PlayStation shovelware.
>>12709547>nobody wanted itI did.
>>12708894>Why was n64 only ever popular in america?because americans are attracted to colorful and shiny things, which is why they are the perfect goyim
>>12709507I love the 64 and think the DD is neat, but im honestly really glad it didn't become the norm for it in the long run.
>>12708894Soccer moms bought their kids a Nintendo 64 because The 700 Club told them that PlayStation games have blood
>>12708894I can't speak for every EU country, but I can say that in Italy it did well (probably due to the fact that it was distributed by a powerful company here Gruppo Giochi Preziosi that spent a lot in advertising). Even in my city which is not a big one by all means, I could easily find people in my same age range who talked and exchanged views / tips about Mario 64, Zelda OOT and all the other popular games. Of course the PS1 did better than the N64 here as well, but I wouldn't consider the N64 a failure in Italy. Ps: I owned both systems so I didn't really care for consolewars.
Serious answer as to (partially explain) why it failed in Europe
>>12710386Side note: at the time we didn't have much correct info about release dates of a new system (and the games too). As a matter of fact, for Christmas '96 me and my brother asked our parents to buy us a Saturn so we went to this big shop and the owner told us instead to reserve an N64 and wait for its release in March, because it was already getting difficult for them (and other shops / resellers) to get Saturn games and they were sure that N64's presence in the market would be much stronger due to the fact that Giochi Preziosi would be distributing it. I must say he was right because you could find N64 and PS1 games everywhere from small shops to malls, the same could not be said about the Saturn sadly.
>>12710386Swede here, N64 did quite well up here, even if PSX did better. I had both, and I enjoyed both.>>12710401Saturn wasn't very known here, I didn't know it existed at the time, and I never heard of it or saw it anywhere, only learning about it later.People just kinda wondered where Sega went, until the Dreamcast turned up.
>>12710412Yeah same for me, PS1 did better of course but I enjoyed both. I knew about the Saturn mostly through a magazine that I used to buy between 95 and 99 who covered every system, and initially the Saturn had a lot of coverage there. But that was basically the only exposure I had to the Saturn because the only shop in my region that constantly had games for the system was one in a city that is a 1hr drive away, so not really an option unless I wanted to only buy games through mail-order.>>12710391Even if the N64 only came out in march 97 I can say that the hype for the system and Mario 64 was off the charts. The reasons why PS1 did better were as per usual: price, cd-player and first and foremost the fact that you could copy game cd's. The local shop owner acknowledged piracy and even stopped renting games for a while, but when he saw that this impacted his business he embraced piracy and offered to modify your PS1 for the equivalent of what would be 50€ today. And other shops here did the same afaik.
>>12710429>and first and foremost the fact that you could copy game cd's.No one was buying a psx because you could rip games back in 95. CD burning wouldn't be big until the late 90s and early 00 when broadband internet was becoming a thing and you could actual download more than a floppy disk worth of data.
>>12710436you can say / believe what you want, but everyone here knew ''a guy'' who would do that for you for today equivalent's of 5 €. A friend of mine in early '97 already had a collection of like 80 games and they were all pirated
>>12710439and the same guy did it for PC games too, that's how I got Diablo and Warcraft II back in the day, two games for 20.000 lire (10 € roughly).
>>12710439I'm not saying people didn't know a guy. I'm saying that that guy was rare and most people buying a psx weren't buying it "first and foremost" because they can burn CDs. Hell, most anons I imagine on /vr/ that are even millienials weren't actually buying their own console--their parents were buying it and some boomer probably isn't considering if their son's friend could burn CDs.
>>12710456yeah of course I get what you're saying, but if there was this type of guy in a city with 20000 inhabitants, it's not hard to imagine that in bigger ones finding someone who would sell pirated games could be even easier. but again, I'm speaking from my personal experience, but everyone I knew who owned a PS1 (me inclued) had many pirated games in their collection
>>12710458I just object to it being "first and foremost" reason. At least during it's prime in the mid 90s. Sure by the late 90s and especially the early 00s by the time the ps2 is out then yeah a bunch of poor people are probably at that point buying a psx because it's cheap and games are easy to pirate.
>>12710456also, you're right about burning cd's not being the main reason why ps1 was a success in Italy, not at first. however, when the fact that you could pirate ps1 games became common knowledge, it attracted a lot of people who were even not into gaming before and that would never drop money on a n64. When I was in middle school (99-00'), even many girls had a ps1 at home with pirated games lmao, good times
>>12710473In the US, it should be stressed how fast CD burning took off. Like in 97 you might have one guy in the whole grade that you know that has a CD burner. But by like I dunno 2002, they were everywhere and everyone was sharing burned CDs with games, albums, even full of meme videos of the times like Star Wars Gangster Rap and stuff like that.
>>12708894>Why was n64 only ever popular in america?Because Americans were smart enough to recognize that 64-bit is twice as good as 32-bit. Unfortunately, other regions were too stupid to figure that out, which is what really held that generation back from being as great as it might have been.
The 16-bit era happened during a time when many countries were either enduring their own shit storms or were about to. And they hadn't even recovered by the time it was over.
>>12709295The shit you guys make up is fucking hilarious. Genesis had the highest attach rate of any console in the NA region pre-PS1. The average Genesis owner had 2x the Genesis games as the average SNES owner did SNES games.
>>12710567Thanks, I really do enjoy making shit up in these threads.
>>12708910dreamcast had tons of steam in japan though, arguably more than in the US, considering sega rally 2 only got online on the JP version
It has that rare, effortless charm you’d normally associate with a first-party Nintendo game. But you’d be mistaken: this is a PS2 game.
Children's toy for the wotsit-fingered retard kid from the weird family who's house smelled of piss. There's a reason anyone you knew who owned the thing only had like, 3 or 4 games for it. In Bongland if you didn't go from Megadrive to Playstation it's because you were the kid who brought headlice to school once a month and you dad kissed you on the mouth.
>>12708894>Why was n64 only ever popular in america?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uDQ8mTYUHQBrainwashing the kids
>>12708910>Most of dreamcast sales were in america too.Japan never gave a shit about Sega, they had a small core fan base who kept buying all consoles for completionism' sake, and the Saturn had Virtua Fighter, but that was that.
>>12710882snoyggers and shitgatards never had a commercial with such SOVL
>>12709639A lot of saturnfags when they argue against SoAfags
>>12708925Because console hardware add ons do much more poorly. Better to just support the base console.
>>12711138>Because console hardware add ons do much more poorly. Better to just support the base console.Except the N64 really needed that add on. $100 (in 90s money) cartridges which have 64MB of capacity at most (and usually far less) just wasn't cutting it. There was no better way to make the cartridge limitations work for the N64 better than how it did, and we see the results of that. The 64DD would have corrected the problem. And consumers would have bought into it because the 64DD disks would be much cheaper, and not only that but also better because of the higher capacity and writing abilities. This would have become apparent over time.To give you an example of something similar which did work out well, look at the cassette adapter for the Commodore 64. The standard stock C64 can only accept cartridges, but cartridges are expensive (same issue with the N64), so they came out with both a cassette adapter and a floppy drive add on. Both of those sold well and did well despite being addons. Games on floppies and cassettes were much cheaper that cartridges.Hell, even the Sega CD didn't really fail too badly. It could have done better if Sega supported it more, though. This reputation add-ons get where people think they're a bad idea that always invariably fails stems from the 32X. Yeah, that failed. It was a bad idea to come out with that, then rush out the Saturn which competed against it. Add-ons only work if they're supported properly, which Sega obviously didn't do with the 32X. So that's where the bad rep of add-ons comes from. But don't think this is an axiomatic rule that addons always fail no matter what, because its not true and examples of successes debunk that.Also, the Famicom disk drive. It never came out anywhere except Japan, but it was successful enough in Japan that Nintendo supported the kiosks for it all the way up to 2003.
Either the Saturn was a hit in Japan that came in a solid second place to Playstation, or we have to admit that the N64, which sold worse in Japan than the Saturn despite the Japanese loving and respecting Nintendo, is a failed console just like Saturn.We go with the first choice, because if millenial unctendies heads explode from finding out their favorite console was a flop there won't be anyone left to take orders in English at Burger King.
>>12708894N64 was probably the most Western centric Nintendo console to date, it’s quite surprising how it sold worse in Japan (even got outsold by the Saturn) and Europe yet it’s super popular in America.I think it boils down to Rare doing most of the heavy lifting like Banjo Kazooie or Goldeneye, a good chunk of licensed/sports games, a heavy emphasis on platformers (Mario/Banjo/DK etc) which weere pretty popular in the west and virtually no JRPGs except for Paper Mario and that Quest 64 game no one bought.It explains why the system is integrated so much into a lot of millennial gamer YouTube culture.
>For reference snes sold similar number in americaSNES drones want so badly for you to believe they're not the same people as N64 fags, despite all the obvious evidence.
>>12710486kek
>>12711403>$100 (in 90s money) cartridgesNo N64 game cost that much unless you were buying it from a scalper on the street. I got DK64 when it was fresh for less than $70 and that was a big game packaged with an Expansion Pak. Even big third party games were never priced at more than $80. The price of cartridges wasn’t ideal (unless you were Nintendo), but $100 a game was not normal at any point during the console’s lifespan.
>>12711518The social aspect also can not be underestimated. It the party console and as vast as their libraries were, theres really nothing on saturn or Playstation that could match the popularity of its 3 and 4 player games.
>>12708894In 8th grade all the popular kids had an N64 when you went to their house, the losers with no friends had a PS1. And even then I never saw people I went to school with have a PS1, they had an N64 or Sega Genesis, when I got older and saw the PS1 sold like 100 million I always thought how?
>>12711403>Also, the Famicom disk drive. That thing existed for some very specific circumstances of economics and resources, and Nintendo themselves would largely abandon making games for it once they could just make cartridge games again (hence why they had cartridge re-releases of FDS games).That they supported it like that for years after the fact was probably just through sheer grace because people with soul still had a say in how to run the company by that point, unlike today.That was not the case with the 64DD, which was devised as a sort of attempted band-aid solution for the main bottleneck of the N64, but Nintendo correctly realized that "Actually, this is a terrible solution and customers aren't going to fall for it, so let's just cut our losses with it here and avoid this problem for the next gen console instead."The 64DD costs money by itself to invest in, the disks were not cheaper enough than cartridges nor did they have better enough storage capacity to be really worth it, it was an extremely Too Little, Too Late idea, and was properly discarded as such.>>12712159Also this.
>>12712159>No N64 game cost that muchI could be experiencing the Mandela effect, but that's what I remember. I can't find proof to back it though. Nonetheless, here's an ad from the time showing some priced at $75. Adjusted for inflation that's something like $150 in today's money, which is insane.
>>12712170>nor did they have better enough storage capacity to be really worth itThis became true towards the end of the N64's life, when cartridge storage space rose to a maximum of 64MB. Still not great in comparison to CDs of course, but much better than the state of things when the N64 first launched. The first year of the N64 had cartridges 4-12MB in size, and ones on the higher end of that were the ones that ended up costing a lot more at retail. Then around 1998 32MB carts appeared, and finally 64MB in 1999. The prices of carts also went down too, even as their capacities increased. So by the end of the N64's life the problem was alleviated to some extent and by then the 64DD was kinda pointless. But it was an idea which made sense around 1996-1997. The N64 desperately needed something like that back then.
>>12712245The only way those disks would have made actual sense is if the N64 had been made around them to begin with instead of cartridges, but they would still be really far behind actual CD-ROM in storage capacity.It's a bad band-aid solution to a problem they should have solved during the N64's development, but it was way too late to address after launch.
>>12708894Nintendo was pretty popular all around. Through brilliant marketing, they established their brand as desirable to a young generation. That acted as a flywheel over time which can entrust those before to entrust to a newer younger generation and so forth. The N64 was also popular in Japan too from what I can tell. I don't define a failure as less popularity, in fact my preferred console of the time, the Saturn, I don't see as a failure either and that was definitely not popular but I see it as very successful for delivering games appealing to me. The N64 has quite some number of those kinds of games to me too.
>>12708985Current year
>>12708918Load times on PS1 were comically bad
>>12714308Capacity on N64 carts was laughably low
>>12714308The music quality was not. It's why the release of THPS 1 killed the N64.
>>12714308>10 seconds of wait for better gameplay, framerate graphics and sound than the N64 will ever haveSure
>>12714308most people will put up with 5 to 10 seconds of extra loading if that means the game not looking like putrid garbage with no cutscenes and disgusting audio.
>>12708894Goldeneye was one of the only games of the era that didn't seem 'gay' in any way. Every game from Japan is a bit 'gay'. You understand this even if you accept it. So if you were a non-weeb American male (90%? of gamers at that time) you had to buy a 64. Sure, games like Wipeout/G-Police are not 'gay' but they aren't system sellers. This issue didn't apply in Europe and Japan where 'gay' things are popular. Australia also shipped a lot of 64s because stuff like Final Fantasy is many times gayer than what a non-weeb from here could bear
>>12714308guess I'll wait
>>12714607I like how the GE pic has to make him face a wall so MoH's 10-foot distance doesn't get humiliated.
>>12714630Was kind enough to keep the GE pic 10-feet away from said wall to not totally humiliate its woeful textures
>>12708894It was popular in my parts of Europe, probably half the boys my age had one. Some had one and also a PSX, because there wasn't much reason to not have both if you could afford it.We got our N64 from our parents, and after some time my big brother also got a PSX with his own money because he could score a bunch of games at a good price from a friend of his who was selling it with his games. So we played on both, the N64 was in the living room and sometimes either of us played there, and he had the PSX in his room, and sometimes we played there.Good times. I remember when he got a copy of Castlevania Chronicles, and I thought it was the sickest 2D graphics I had ever seen in my life at the time (also the music was amazing). We also played a lot of Goldeneye, SMASH, and Mario Party 2.>>12714607These aren't all clear cut, Duke Nukem 64 has some performance/space trims and some censorship (lolNintendo), but it also adds a lot of new content and details which are fairly good, including new weapons.Quake 2 I recall hearing actually had a number of larger differences in content between the two console ports, but I might be wrong, someone who knows is free to correct me on that. We had Quake 2 on PC instead.I haven't played any MoH games, though I've heard the first one was very good. Goldeneye 007 is probably a fairly different game aside from also being an FPS, but it's a very fun action game where you play as James Bond.>>12714664You can either have big blocky pixel textures, or you can have big stretched out smear textures, high texture resolution wasn't really on the table either way for either console, the importance came to texture quality and how it's applied. Goldeneye's textures were all solid and deliberately designed around the smudge filtering for performance reasons, and on TV's back in the day this just wasn't a problem, We used SCART at the time and even that only added a bit of clarity overall, you'd get blending with either console.
>>12714607ps1 look like shit here
>>12714673The GE/MoH comparison guy is completely disingenous. MoH came out over 2 years after GE (late 99 vs mid 97) (those 2 years meant a LOT) so its equivalent game to compare to would be PD. He once conceded that he hadn't realized this. Then put it out of his mind and got back to saying that MoH should be considered the seminal game and Goldeneye rode its coat tail, and suchlike
>>12714673MoH is kind of like GE but it's slower paced and every level is a series of dark hallways.
ONE LAKE
>>12714630I'd rather have a shorter view distance, for a playable frame rate, over 15 fps and a further render distance of vaseline textures.
>>12715254Except Medal of Honor has an even worse frame rate than GE, plus screen tearing.
>>12715264lol
>>12715264Performance in GE is so poor and inconsistent and everything is so blurry(to the point where you can't even tell what you're aiming at) that the developers had to implement an auto-aim system.MoH is the oppositehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE5e3UzQbPUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FbQl5uGFc
>>12708894It was popular in Murica for the Simple reason that it was a juggernaut multiplayer system that just so happened to have a few of the highest rated single player games too. Even in 2026 you will still get bitches (actual females) talking shit about how they will beat you at Mario Kart and 9/10 times they are talking about MK64. I don’t think a console has ever sold so little while being played by so many because of the multiplayer games. Still has the best Kart racerStill has the best Wrestling game(s)Still has some of the best arcade port racersStill has off the wall goofy but somehow good racing games like episode one pod racer and Beetle Adventure Racing (which is so much fun, just started playing it again recently and it shouldn’t work but it just does).Still has one of the most off the wall “fighters” in Smash that felt truly unique upon release for a lot of people (see the current thread up for smash just ignore the idiot ragebaiting on focus on the stories of those who played it growing up to get an idea)Still has the best video game translation of a board game (this one is pretty subjective I’ll admit but Mario Party for me is the best board game adaptation for a console ever, at least the n64 versions).Still has one of the most pure fun Bomberman games (another multiplayer masterpiece)Has one of the best console shooters in Goldeneye, which you guessed it, was big at parties for split screen deathmatch.People may sperg out about my comment but look, it’s got two brand new fpga systems this year alone for a reason, when most consoles don’t even have one and the 64 is pretty cheap and easy to get still. It just was THE system for multiplayer before online took over for consoles and has a couple diamond tier singleplayer experiences.
5th gen should not have existed/thread
>>12708894It was just the most popular toy among the children. The best christmas gift and birthday present for your son or daughter for four years straight.The constant TV commercials, N64 kiosks in many McDonald's and toy stores, plus the very family friend games, all helped boost its popularity
When did it become clear that N64 wasn't going to match PS1 in sales? It had a monster year in 1997.
>>12715868when zelda got delayed
>>12715868When it was clear 3rd parties were choosing ps1 over n64 pretty unanimously
>>12708985There's still a few of us left faggot, and You're gonna lose in the end.
But it's already the end.
