Design Decisions (II) - N64 vs PSX

I was talking to some friends the other day, and an interesting debate about video games sprung up. The question was whether the Nintendo 64 was more profitable than the PlayStation or not. Although they were both machines that allowed people to play games with them, there were several key design decisions that differentiated the two, which resulted in different levels of success.

A Nintendo 64, followed by a PlayStation

Sony opted for an optical disc format for it's games, while Nintendo stuck with it's ROM cartridges. Nintendo's console was also more technologically advanced than the PlayStation in several respects. Though due to the limited memory in ROM cartridges and texture cache, it was more difficult to produce games in this format. As a result, Sony was able to pump out a lot more games at a cheaper price. However, it was much easier to pirate PlayStation games, and this would have cut into profits significantly.

From what I've seen on forums (after trying to look up statistics on this), the general consensus is that these numbers are not available, or just very difficult to find (though most lean towards Sony due to the number of units sold). Either way, Sony's decision to go for a console that uses optical disks greatly helped it with sales of it's next generation console, the PlayStation 2.