[jmcgough]

For me as a kid, there was this sense of confusion and whiplash when it came to post-genesis hardware. The CD came out in 92, with no real notable games at launch: Sonic CD came out a year later, and Snatcher + Lunar at the end of its life in 95. The 32x came out shortly after in 94, and only saw a handful of games before being buried by the more powerful Saturn in 95.

With two major peripherals and a new console in a short period of time, each with its own library of games, it was hard to understand all that as a kid without internet access, much less afford it, so I stayed clear and sold my genesis for a SNES, then got an N64.

The short hardware life probably spurned a lot of 3rd party developers too.

Nintendo was much smarter, with longer cycles between major consoles, and no expensive enhancement add-ons to segment its games. When you bought a Nintendo console, you knew it would have a 5+ year road map and was a good investment (okay, ignoring the virtual boy). Every gameboy has had backwards compatibility with at least the previous generation, so it always felt "safe" to buy the newest model.

[duxup]

I recall the same thing.

Everyone understood what Nintendo was up to. Sega friends (that's how I thought of them, defined by the console they owned) would tell me about this or that technology, but not many games for this new tech.... on the Nintendo systems (and later my PC) I had games.

By the time the Saturn was out.... most Sega friends had converted to something else, it was already over.