alt Hacker NewsYou could have saved a lot of money by using CDs instead of cartridges.
If you sell games for roughly the same amount as before (or even a bit cheaper), you have extra surplus you can use to subsidise the cost of the console a bit.
Effectively, you'd be cutting a corner on worse load times, I guess?
Keep in mind that the above ignores questions of piracy. I don't know what the actual impact of a CD based solution would have been, but I can tell for sure that the officials at Nintendo thought it would have made a difference when they made their decision.
imho, Nintendo had a hard enough time with preventing piracy and unlicensed games with the NES and SNES and saw the PS1 got modded within a year, even with the special black coated discs to hide the tracks. There wasn’t a lot of optical/compact disc copy protection magic at the time and, cd-rs and writers started getting popular quickly as well. ps1 in 1994, n64 in 1996, backwards Dreamcast GD-ROMs and beginnings of larger discs and DVDS in 98.