I don't think it would have had much of a difference :/

It's the combination of failures after the Genesis/MegaDrive that led to Segas downfall.

The main issue with the Saturn was it was difficult to make games for it. Not so much the Price. 400$ at that time. PSX was 300$ and the 3DO 700$.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Vj88c0lY--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/199q203cc5y96jpg.jpg

"The Saturn's quad polygons supported forward texture mapping, allowing limited perspective correction for 3D graphics, compared to the perspective distortion of the PlayStation's affine texture mapping. However, the Saturn's use of quads was not industry standard, compared to the PlayStation's triangle polygons. The Saturn was known for its difficult 3D development environment, due to its complex parallel processing hardware architecture, requiring familiarity with assembly language, lack of an operating system, and initial lack of C language support, useful development tools and graphics software libraries. The Saturn's VDP1 also had issues when it came to transparency for foreground objects, despite the VDP2 having fully functional transparency for backgrounds. While the VDP1 technically supported transparency, it had limitations which many developers found difficult to work around and instead resorted to dithering for VDP1 foreground objects"

http://segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn#Hardware

Sth. else i want to address:

"The Saturn has two controller ports, and the standard Saturn controller builds on that seen in the six button Sega Mega Drive controller. It adds two shoulder buttons, first seen on the Super NES controller, bringing the amount of buttons up to nine. The 3D Control Pad, released later with NiGHTS into Dreams, would supply the console with an analogue stick and analogue shoulder buttons, the latter later being used in the Sega Dreamcast before being adopted by Nintendo and Microsoft for their GameCube and Xbox consoles, respectively."

This is false. Shoulder buttons were first seen on the XE-1 AP. This ugly mugly arrived a whole year earlier than the SNES.

http://segaretro.org/XE-1_AP

BasilZero said: Ka-pi96 said: Sega Saturn is the one that 'competed' with the PS1 and N64 right? Yeah, I'm not sure releasing add ons for the megadrive are what lead to that flopping. I literally never even knew the Saturn existed back then, still not entirely sure it was a 5th gen console even now. So when kids wanting to play games and asking their parents for consoles for xmas don't even know your console exists... it's not surprising you do poorly   Would it be embarassing if I say I didnt know the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast existed during their respected eras? I've only see N64/PS1/GCN/Xbox and PS2s lol

Yes.

I wouldn't think that. Sure, the add-ons, mainly the 32x, weren't such a good idea. Nintendo had a better solution by putting chipsets inside the cartridges instead. The main problem was the Saturn campaign. The surprise release was a terrible idea and they not hammering the ps1 in marketing. Because, even if ps1 was 299 and Saturn 399, with ps1 we still had to buy memory cards while Saturn had built-in memory. Saturn itself being powered by 2 CPU also made it really complicated to develop for, mainly 3d games. But, if history show us something, if the system is a success developers will adapt, ps2 was the hardest to develop for, but due to being so in front in sales developers had no option. Wii was easier to develop than ps3 and x360, and it didn't mean nothing.

Saturn did more damage honestly, and when you consider a lot of SEGA's really bad decisions prior to the Dreamcast, they probably wouldn't have lasted too much longer anyways.