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RE: Sega Saturn – What the Hell Happened?
Great article on the Sega. As a Sega fan, I approve this article :). I also think that the Saturn could not compete because of the fact that is was quite easy to play copied games on the playstation. A conspiracy theorie of mine is that this was a strategy by Sony to infiltrate the gaming console market.
I know later on there was the swap trick but not many, reliable, methods prior to that that I know of. I do know that Sony went out of their way to make the Playstation dirt simple to program for. Something Sega forgot when they transitioned from the Genesis (off the shelf parts) to the Saturn (mostly proprietary chips and A LOT of them). This is why I think companies supported the Playstation more.
I remember an interview with someone from Core Design, in an old issue Gamefan, and they were discussing Tomb Raider on each platform. They said the Playstation was pretty easy to program for, almost as easy as PC (which is what they used to develop the game in the first place). Saturn, not so much. I believe this was later revealed as a reason Tomb Raider 2 never came to the Saturn also - it was just too hard to program and get similar results out of in comparison to the Playstation.
I think this is why the Dreamcast was developed to be super easy to program for. Sega realized they messed up but it was too late. Sony repeated the Saturn debacle by making the Playstation 2 too complicated to easily program for but they had the sales and companies want sales so they dealt with it.