Alternate History: Sega doesn't drop the ball in the 4th to 5th gen transition

[Mr Puggsly]

JWeinCom said:

The problem is that add ons just rarely work in gaming. By definition, they just cater to an already existing portion of the existing base. Even if your system is a major success and sells 100 million, you need to sell the add on to half of your base to get it to a decent market.

Meanwhile, you're narrowing your brand as a whole because big titles like Sonic CD are only accessible to a small base. Then you have market confusion, especially when you have the 32X as well. People don't necessarily want to buy a machine if they think they may have to keep upgrading it to play everything. They want to be set. 

I don't fault Sega, because it was a new industry. Sega had a lot of innovative ideas that would be refined successfully by others, but they were sometimes ahead of their time in the wrong way. If Sega had not done either add on, and refocused their efforts into making sure the Saturn had great content they'd have been better off. 

Add-ons just generally aren't a strong idea, unless you're fine with them being a niche product and they're not going to take up too many resources. The Wii-mote could have easily been an add on to the Gamecube (I think it was conceived as such) but Nintendo realized from previous products that it was best to sell it as a complete product. 

I think the goal of add-ons was trying to keep users engaged with unique or better experiences. Maybe even to deter them from other platforms. Sega CD wasn't much of a success, but I do believe it had a solid library with numerous titles that were later ported to other platforms. That was certainly the goal of the 32X, but it seems like horribly designed hardware overall.

Ideas I consider bad from Nintendo were the DSi and New 3DS. The DSi was needed for access to digital games. While the New 3DS was a half assed upgrade that gave access to an underwhelming library. They also locked SNES emulation to New 3DS to drive sales.

Its also worth noting Nintendo played with add-ons for NES. They worked on a CD add-on for SNES. The N64 did get the 64DD in Japan as well. When I look at Sega CD, I consider we got some solid games that Genesis couldn't really duplicate or do so as well.