There has always been a lot of similarities between the PS3 and the Sega Saturn ... Esentially, you have two (amazingly) expensive systems with unconventional and difficult to develop for architectures which sell to 1/4 to 1/3 the level of the previous console released by the manufacturer.
The reasons why the PS3 has performed (in absolute terms) so much better than the Saturn did is because the industry has grown a lot since the 16 bit era (80 Million SNES and Genesis consoles compared to over 170 Million PS2, Dreamcast, XBox and Gamecube systems), inflation means that the PS3 isn't as expensive as the Saturn was (in real terms), and the PS2 was a far more successful system in its time than the Genesis ever was (which means that there is more residual support for Sony than there was for Sega).
