Sega's 32-bit system that was a
failure for many reasons.
The only thing preventing it from being a
complete failure is
Sega's extraordinary
first party development teams and arcade ports.
You could probably find a Saturn exremely cheap these days. Snag it while you can, there are some GREAT games for the system!
Why it failed
I payed a lot of attention to the Saturn, trying to figure out why it failed, and I think the best answer, in the end, was the lack of
third party support. The
Sega CD and
32X certainly hurt
Sega as well, and perhaps without an already
doubting public the
Saturn would have achieved the necessary
third party support. Why didn't it though?
The
Sega Saturn is actually, from everything I've read, even
PSX fans, technically superior to the
Playstation. The Saturn actually has TWO chips, each only a bit slower than the
Playstation's single chip. This made the
Saturn hard as hell to program for.
Yu Suzuki and Sega's
first party development teams did some amazing things with the system, but no
third party developers thought it was worth the time to code specially for the
Saturn.
The
Playstation on the other hand was
extremely easy to publish games to alongside the
PC. The
PSX has a huge library of fast cheap
mass-market games with no
inherent value besides
marketability. Why take a lot of extra coding time to reach the Saturn's small
user base when a game can be published simultaneously to the PSX and PC with ease?
Why was Saturn's user base small? No third party games! Why no third party games? User base is too small to warrant the extra time!
Vicious cycle eh? ::sigh::
Sega learned well from this. Thats why the
Dreamcast can actually run
Windows CE: there is now no reason for game publishers
not to port to the
Dreamcast.