lol why is this being downvoted? This is the truth.
Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling.
Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular.
The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for.
If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.
> Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
One of the best selling games of that generation was a JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre. Interest in it didn't begin waning until the next generation.
> The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
There were hundreds of "tent-pole 3D" games released for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were very popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a mainstream..."genre".
Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic. The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third party developers away) and (as you touched on), the majority of the best ones never left Japan.
I was a gamer from Atari 2600 to Saturn. My experience was exactly that once I was bored with Virtua Fighter it felt like nothing good was coming out for it. Even Virtua Fighter while fun didn't stay that fun for very long.
I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was $399, $790 adjusted for inflation.
It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not playing it a few months after. I had no other games but Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my interest in gaming.
Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling.
Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular.
The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for.
If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.