[mairusu]

But they had the insight. And the insight they got was that 3D was not there yet for the home market, it was unrealistic to have good 3D for cheap (eg. no wobbly textures, etc), as it was still really challenging to have good 3D on expensive dedicated hardware.

[JohnBooty]

Yeah. The 3D revolution was obvious in hindsight, but not so obvious in the mid 1990s. I was a PC gamer as well at the time so even with the benefit of seeing things like DOOM it wasn't necessarily obvious that 2.5D/3D games were going to be popular with the mainstream any time soon.

A lot of casual gamers found early home 3D games kind of confusing and offputting. (Honestly, many still kind of do)

We went from highly evolved colorful, detailed 2D sprites to 3D graphics that were frankly rather ugly most of the time, with controllers and virtual in-game cameras that tended to be rather janky. Analog controllers weren't really even prevalent thing for consoles at this point.

Obviously in hindsight the Saturn made a lot of bad bets and the Playstation made a lot of winning ones.