The other thing to remember about cartridges is that they presented a lot of additional risk to the publisher due to the manufacturing time. Aside from costing substantially more to create than a CD, they took a huge amount of time to produce, and were only created at Nintendo's facilities in Japan. So when a publisher was releasing a game for N64, they had to be really, really smart about the number of cartridges they manufactured for the game's launch. They were putting out a lot of cash up-front, and if they guessed poorly at the demand for the title, they were either left with a lot of product on the shelves (which cost a lot of money), or NO product on the shelves for the next 45 days, as the next batch of cartridges was produced. Both of these situations were pretty painful. Disc-based media, being cheaper and faster to produce, was an easy winner.