Nah, I believe the human experience is inherently subjective when it comes to something like enjoying a video game, so even a very unpopular position is valid if that is how somebody really feels.

hmm. well ok then. 

i used to work at gamestop in 2007-2009, was always ridiculed for liking the wii the best. i wish everyone at the store had the mentality youre telling me you have. i got put through the ringer constantly. i always got to fall back on sales at least. there was like a year straight where the top four or five selling games every week were all wii games lol. but yeah, they were all hardcore gamers and i liked playing with a baby system.

I was fooled by this thing as a kid:

And guess what? I had a ton of fun with this thing. I think my favorite games were Baseball, Adventure Island, Mappy, Contra, Castlevania, DuckTales 2...

A friend of mine had a Dynavision.

But the Playstation 2 was absurd here in Brazil. I got mine in 2010, and it was still very popular around here. The Xbox 360 was gaining ground, but very slowly, at least in my town.

I can relate; Wii was my favourite system of the 7th generation as well, which did mean I had to put up with all manner of elitist losers acting like being a Wii owner meant you were inferior to the "glorious PS360 master race."

Ultimately though, it's their loss; I got to enjoy great games on my Wii that they missed out on cos they were too immature to put aside childish console wars. In the end, if you played what you wanted and enjoyed it, then you're smarter than they were, and better off.

Wii is great. How I got games like Xenoblade. The Last Story. Fragile Dreams. Zak & Wiki. Tatsunoko vs Capcom. No More Heroes. Earth Seeker. Endless Ocean. Lost in Shadow. Madworld. And a couple dozen more. It was a good console for old-school light gun game fans like myself. We got SEGA ports of LA Machine Guns and Ghost Squad. I love all 3 consoles that gen but I think 360 is my go-to most of the time when playing those consoles. I know what you mean. That is peak era of people using dumbass terms like casual and hardcore gamers. So fucking lame.

I had a genesis, saturn and dreamcast. But sega was never my primary/favorite system. SNES, ps1 and ps2 were my focus consoles. I enjoy sega but always felt they were grossly overrated. When sega fell it wasn't a huge loss.

this basically sums it up

SEGA contributed many modern innovations in hardware and development software. Sound and their arcade hardware were top of the line in the 90s always ahead of everyone. They had games in 1996 running on arcades that look better than some PS2 games in Scud Race as one example. They were doing online gaming and cloud gaming in the 90s. DLC. First console with a web camera/Digital Camcorder/Picture Camera and email service. Phone service. Video sharing. SEGA was a huge loss. When Xbox was being developed Microsoft used Dreamcast's as a focus test console. DC is the first console to use Direct X, not Xbox. First console with an MMO. MS never filled the void SEGA left in innovation. XBL while great was still built off what SEGA built in SEGANET. Xbox has made contributions but never to the degree SEGA did.

Tom Kalinske taking the marketing to colleges and older audiences and many of his strategies are what Sony used with PS1 but they had more resources and got a wider reach. Still, SEGA got the ball rolling. Too long of a list of everything but SEGA's innovations to gaming in the 90s while not as well known as Nintendo's were just as invaluable. I mean shit, they had the Switch idea in 1995. Saturn and Dreamcast solved Analog Stick drift in the 90s by creating Hall Effect sticks which are only now starting to pop up more and more in modern controllers. Xbox Series X Dpad is just an improved version of the Saturn Dpad concept. Xbox controller in general owes itself to SEGA. Virtua Fighter is the first 3D fighting game.  Tekken became the game it did because of VF.

Saying not much was lost is either pure ignorance or feigning ignorance.

Ignorance has nothing to do with it, but rather facts and a honest retrospective view.

Concepts are great but without execution it means little. Henry Ford didn't invite the automotive but rather figured out how to get it in the hands of the people.

Sega had great concepts but was God awful at execution.

Genesis, cd and 32x was just dumb. Expensive, multiple power supplies and very little software benefit.

Saturn was stupid overpriced and was a developer nightmare which lead to a subpar library compared to the ps1.

The DC was good but sega was rightfully a joke at that point in time.

At the end of the day there is a reason sega is a nobody while Nintendo is kicking out tears and Sony just launched Spiderman.

Sega fell for a reason.  

I feel like all that kind of stuff didn't really make an impact. So they tried to do online first, big deal. It was basically nothing and had no impact on what was going on at the time. Whether they did that or not Microsoft was still going to implement Xbox live into their new console. Their sound was trash compared to the snes, that's a fact. I'm sorry if you're a big scud race fan or something, but that game basically had no impact either. Sending emails, again had no impact on anything. Also had a web cam that couldn't be used in any meaningful way.

It's no secret that Microsoft and Sega had a good relationship and Sega played a part in the development of Xbox, but even then, that proves the point that nothing was lost in their exit. In fact, anything that they would have contributed was able to be better executed because of their exit since their ideas were being realized through Xbox. So really all those points you're making relating to Xbox and Sega just prove the point that nothing at all was lost by their exit.