| Shadow1980 said: The Saturn was a greater failure than the Wii U was. Sega totally botched the launch, the system had poor software support, and generally it had everything going wrong for it. It sold a paltry 1.36 million units in the U.S., far less than the nearly 5.5M units the Wii U sold. In Europe, it sold only about a million units, again far less than the Wii U sold in the region (about 3.5M). In Japan, the Saturn fared better than it did in the U.S., and was Sega's best-performing system in the region, selling over 5 million units, which is well ahead of the Wii U's lifetime tally, but that's still weak numbers and doesn't even come close to making up for the atrocious performance it had in the West. |
Well, it depends on the launches the we're talking about here. Because the Sega Saturn was basically like what the Dreamcast was in North America, in that it had a hot start because cooling off. Thanks to the popularity of Virtua Fighter and Virtua Fighter 2 at the time, the Saturn was a pretty big hit in Japan in 1994 and 1995. In fact, it was outselling the PS1 at first. I think that this initial success may have made Sega of Japan a little overconfident, which made them pressure Sega of America into having the surprise May launch in order to take advantage of Virtua Fighter and get a head start on the PS1. However, Virtua Fighter was not the smash success here as it was there, so it did a lot more damage than having the Saturnday launch probably would have. It didn't help either that by mid-1996 the Saturn's steam had cooled down in Japan, and the PS1 greatly increased in sales while the N64 releases and started cutting off the market share. While the Saturn did still end up outselling the N64 in Japan, that's mainly due to its large success in its early-life span.
