The third console curse: Which was the biggest stumble?

[Vinther1991]

In retrospect the Saturn might be the better console out of all four, but business-wise it was certainly either the biggest fail or the second biggest.
I think, considering all the circumstances at the time of release and their long-term impact. I would probably say most successful to least successful would be:
N64>PS3>Saturn>XBONE

The N64, all things considered still performed fairly competitively, and had a strong appeal not only with the core fanbase, unlike the GameCube. They lost a lot of third-party support for sure, but their strong grip on the market had already diminished during the SNES era, and would hit the bottom during the 6th. The N64 was really held up by a handful of extremely highly regarded games, that even mainstream games saw as must-play (Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye).

The PS3 was clearly the best selling out of all four, but considering the position Sony was in prior to it's release, where they were essentially heading towards a potential market monopoly, they really messed up losing so much marketshare to Xbox, Nintendo and PC. Financially it was also not a success. On the other hand, they did manage to get a lot more success towards the end of the generation. And they were also fighting two wars, trying to win the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD format war as well, which they won. Had they lost that war, Sony would have been in serious trouble, so in that sense the PS3 was really a success.

The Saturn didn't do very well compared to the Genesis, but a lot of that can be attributed to the handling of the Genesis towards the end of its life-cycle, with the release of the Sega CD and 32X. Sega essentially flooded the market with hardware. Still the marketing of the Saturn was poor and how they handled the North American release was an absolute disaster. On the positive side, it was their most successful console in Japan, and received solid third party support. The DreamCast also failed, and caused th

The Xbox One did not sell that poorly all things considered, and was overall a decent piece of hardware. However considering the resources MS had, it was a huge disaster. I think mostly, the reveal, release and subsequent decisions made, weakened the brand to an irredeemable extent. The always online DRM, they tried to push might have been the single most anti-consumer, idiotic decision in the history of the industry. Thinking Kinect would be a selling-point was a giant miscalculation too. Then a few years into its life they decide to release everything on PC too, which along with the overall lacking first party support just weakened the Xbox brand even further. They gained some good will with the backwards compatibility and they launched Gamepass, which has yet to prove itself successful, but might end up as such.
Safe to say, MS is still working on recovering from the poor decisions they made during the Xbone era.