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If Sega does everything perfect and makes the Saturn a compelling product to consumers, retailers, and 3rd parties in 1995 then I think things change dramatically. I think people really underestimate how much Sony benefitted from the mistakes both Sega and Nintendo made in the mid-90s, and if the Saturn got Final Fantasy 7 as well as many of the 3rd party games the PS1 got in the real world it would have gotten a huge boost. The Dreamcast would likely not have been released in the first place since Sega would be in much better shape. The PS1 does not come anywhere near 100 million units if it loses Final Fantasy. It may still finish first due to Sony's great marketing at the time, but in this scenario the Saturn would give it much more of a race than the N64 did and Sony would not become the dominant force it was in the PS2 generation. A lot of this would depend on how many exclusive PS1 games go Saturn-exclusive instead and how many go multi-plat. Square exclusively developing for Sega and not on Playstation I think would push Saturn to the number 1 spot. The N64 might be the system that suffers the most sales-wise, as having 2 strong competitors would exacerbate its problems. Mario 64, Goldeneye, and Ocarina of Time would still blow everyone away, but simply having another strong console eating into its marketshare would seriously hurt Nintendo, and losing Final Fantasy to Sega would hurt even more than losing it to Sony since the Sega rivalry had more history to it.  But again, this is assuming Sega doesn't screw anything up, and Sega would have been a completely different company to pull that off.  It's not quite like the N64 where Nintendo could have pulled through if they either went with CDs or didn't pull out of the SNES Playstation deal and it took both mistakes to sink the N64.  Fixing any one mistake would never be enough to save the Saturn.

Perhaps a more interesting question is what would have happened if Sega went with its original design for the Saturn in which it would have been a 2d-focused system while the PS1 and N64 were focused on 3d, in effect using the strategy Nintendo would start using with the Wii, Wii U, and Switch a couple of generations later and doing its own thing while not competing as directly with the other players.

Last edited by h2ohno - on 16 February 2021