[smolder]

It's hard to say what the biggest mistake was exactly. The Sega CD and 32x were bad ideas, compared to just creating a new console. The Sega Saturn would have been a great 2D console, but they delayed it to add a really strange (quads versus triangles) underperforming 3D capability to their design. I think the Saturn should have been released earlier in 2D only form, so they could move on to making a 3D capable console that trounced the PlayStation and N64 on a delayed timeline, perhaps even backwards compatible with the 2D Saturn.

[som33]

A CD based Sega system was a great idea but not as an add on, the reality is the cost of hardware back then and the nature of the console market being technology illiterate was the issue.

I was one of the few who got the original Sega CD, the early version one that mounted underneath the genesis. It had cool games like Darkwizard. The real issue was the cost of add on peripherals were too high to get any kind of market penetration. Back then parents bought videogames for kids for their christmas or their birthdays. They'd rent their favorite games from blockbuster/convenience store and then get their parents to buy their favorites.

The reality was consoles and games were expensive and most kids rented games back when sega and nintendo were the kings of gaming before PC gaming had taken off in 1990's.

So the financial barrier to console ownership and the high price tag for parents was the real issue. Sega had a lot of good idea's but not conceived in the right way or at the right time. They acted as if the gaming populations parents were rich.

That was the real issue with many console companies that allowed Sony to get a foothold into console gaming.

Playstation was as popular as it was because of piracy and backups thereby increasing its market, it was "microsoft" method of console dominance - we don't care if you pirate as long as you use our console.

Even if sony didn't intend that, Sony PS1 and PS2 became huge because of ability to pirate games on the platform.

Piracy paradoxically drove sony to success. Everyone forgets places like china, india and third world countries at the time that couldn't really afford games because the the ridiculous prices.

[jacobush]

Anecdotally, I knew a bunch of people with PS1, maybe one of them knew how to pirate games.

[zerocrates]

Yeah, the console I anecdotally associate with particularly easy/common piracy is the Dreamcast.

[riffraff]

Anecdote-wise, everybody in my home town who owned a playstation had pirated games.

You don't need to know how to make illegal copies, you could just buy them for 1/10th of the original price on the street.

[jacobush]

Ok - update - they didn't have pirated games.