[sli]

> Sony famously used a similar model, but then one-upped Nintendo on licensing deals and manufacturing costs to lure major third parties away during the N64/Playstation 1 era leaving Nintendo with a set of very 3rd rate 3rd parties and expensive to produce cartridges. The Playstation on the other hand had over 2500 games.

I'm glad you brought this up, because I remember very vividly looking up the lists of games when I was younger and being startled at just how small the N64 library was by comparison.

[bane]

The N64 library at the top-end is dominated by Nintendo 1st party games and Nintendo 2nd party games (mostly Rare). Almost all other top-tier publishers had moved onto Sony platforms due to better economics for licensing and publishing. Bizarrely, most of the "top" 3rd party publishers for the N64 were Western developers who pushed out mountains of sports games and arcade conversions.

One of the few Japanese companies who stuck with Nintendo was Konami, who may have had favorable publishing deals based on past relationships with Nintendo. But basically everybody else was sick and tired of dealing with Nintendo's helicoptering and incredibly high licensing and manufacturing costs -- even Konami finally just quit and dedicated themselves elsewhere.

Square and The Final Fantasy Series was one of the famous defections, having for years been an exclusive publisher on Nintendo consoles, Square pulled out completely for the N64. I might be misremembering, but I believe Square even had a major RPG in the works for the SNESCD and when Nintendo bungled that platform had to scramble to fit the game onto a SNES cartridge, further souring the relationship.