Some developers such as Factor 5, Rare, and Nintendo were supportive of the solid-state medium due to fast read speeds and bank switching.

Nintendo had already invested into high-capacity secondary storage devices with the Famicom Disk System and the cancelled SNES-CD for their previous two home consoles.

[14] The cartridge for the officially licensed Japanese game Morita Shogi 64, featured a modem and a custom shell to accommodate an RJ11 port and activity LED.

Though it provides the faster load times and greater durability than the CD-ROM format, its solid-state silicon could not be produced as quickly and was more expensive to manufacture, leading to low storage capacity.

Specified at 5 to 50 MiB/s,[1]: 48  Nintendo emphasised the Game Pak' fast load times in comparison to the competing Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation's 2× CD-ROM drives running at about 300 kB/s with high latency.

Bank switching was a common practice for developers in many games, such as Nintendo EAD's Super Mario 64[18] or Factor 5's Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, which allowed for efficient memory usage.

[17] Howard Lincoln said, "[Genyo Takeda, the Nintendo engineer working with Silicon Graphics to design Project Reality] and those guys felt very strongly that it was absolutely essential to have it on a cartridge in order to do the kind of things that we wanted to do with Super Mario.

[24] Rarely would a PlayStation game exceed $50 (equivalent to about $97 in 2023), whereas some Nintendo 64 cartridges were $79.99 ($150)[21][better source needed] like the first print of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

In August 1997, Kelly Flock, president of Sony Interactive Studios America (SISA) said "Most N64 carts are costing consumers $55 to $70, compared with $20 to $50 for a PlayStation CD.

[27] NOA Vice President George Harrison was enthused about the increasing third-party cartridge orders placed after that price drop.

Andrew House, Vice President of Marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, said "They can manufacture the appropriate amount of software without taking a tremendous inventory risk associated with the cartridge business.

A notable exception is Resident Evil 2, which contains the equivalent material of the two CD-ROM discs of the original PlayStation version – albeit compressed – plus some expanded content, higher quality instruments, and surround sound support,[32][33][34] and what Eurogamer called "one of the most ambitious [and impressive] console ports of all time".

[37] CD-ROMs are known for relative ease of copying on personal computers, whereas Game Paks use Nintendo's proprietary format and are more difficult to bootleg.

[40]: 47  On a more positive side, Aaron Curtiss of The Los Angeles Times praised Nintendo's choice of the cartridge medium with its "nonexistent" load times and "continuous, fast-paced action CD-ROMs simply cannot deliver", concluding that "the cartridge-based Nintendo 64 delivers blistering speed and tack-sharp graphics that are unheard of on personal computers and make competing 32-bit, disc-based consoles from Sega [Saturn] and Sony [PlayStation] seem downright sluggish".

However, the choice of a cartridge format, coupled with the commercial failure of the 64DD were also key factors in Nintendo losing both their marketshare and favour with developers.

[24][19][page needed][21] This includes Square,[43] Capcom,[44] and also Enix, who had initially pre-planned Dragon Warrior VII for the Nintendo 64 and its yet-unreleased 64DD disk drive peripheral at least by 1996,[45] but migrated to the PlayStation due to the developers' increasingly ambitious use of storage space with their fundamentally cinematic game format.

[46] In November 1997, Nintendo of America VP George Harrison acknowledged that Square was a "significant" loss, noting the popularity of role-playing games, especially in Japan.

As a result of using a lot of motion data + CG effects and in still images, it turned out to be a mega capacity game, and therefore we had to choose CD-ROM as our media.

[30]: 26  In the 2013 Director's Commentary video about Conker's Bad Fur Day, after observing the imperceptible loading times and the "seamless" transitions between major scenes of the game, Rare programmers said that "the thing about cartridges is … it's solid state ... so it's actually a much more advanced, better medium than discs.

You can't have as much [content] on there—or, rather, you can but it's very expensive—but as a medium, cartridge is [vastly] ahead in superiority to any Blu-ray or disc … [or] hard drives.

"[48]: 5:50 In November 1997, Star Fox designer Jez San lamented that "Very few third-party developers are actually working with N64", for several major business reasons plus the extra time of optimizing a game for constrained cartridge space.

[28] After having developed CD-ROM media in two different LucasArts releases for PlayStation, Factor 5's co-founder Julian Eggebrecht said in a February 1998 publication, We immediately liked the N64 because we didn't have to deal with CDs.

[50] Speaking on his programmers' optimisations for Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, Eggebrecht stated: The big strength was the N64 cartridge.

We use the cartridge almost like normal RAM and are streaming all level data, textures, animations, music, sound and even program code while the game is running.