It was huge. Even without piracy, manufacturing cartridges was expensive. Nintendo made them all and made you pay for the privilege above base costs. The lead t

It was huge. Even without piracy, manufacturing cartridges was expensive. Nintendo made them all and made you pay for the privilege above base costs. The lead time was long and you could be screwed due parts shortages. Got a great game you want to sell? Sorry, Goldeneye is too popular so we’ll make more of those first. Good luck waiting. CDs cost basically nothing. Sony would make them (because of the copyright protection) but Sony was a music company. They could easily churn out millions of the things a week, or maybe a day. So it was possible for them to just make more physical product to sell the Nintendo ever could. Far cheaper. Storage size was also a big issue. Full motion video, CD quality audio, more levels… The PlayStation could do things that the N64 just couldn’t do to storage size. Do you remember the “magazine“ PlayStation Underground? You would sign up and Sony would send you a disc once a month with videos and demos and such. Something like that is 100% impossible (financially) with cartridges.