I was kind of at my gaming prime during the release of the Sega Saturn and later the Playstation which would completely wipe the Saturn out. I was a teenager and really enjoyed video games but there were a lot of reasons why I didn't ever get involved with the Saturn and these were probably the same reason why most other people didn't get on board as well.
I do remember playing the sample unit at Toys 'R Us on a regular basis and at times I seriously contemplated getting one. In the end I never did and outside of the game shops, I never actually played one or even knew anyone that had one.
So why did the gaming world ignore this system? I think there was a lot of reasons.
For starters, and this is probably the biggest problem that I and most people had with this system, it was damn expensive. $400 was a crazy price to pay for a game system back in the early 90's especially after the many years of price war that had been taking place between Sega and Nintendo. To put things into perspective, $400 when you factor in inflation to today would be more than $740. I'm not making this up, it comes from an inflation calculator that you can play around with here.
Another problem was that when the system launched, there was only 6 games total to choose from. Sega of course charged a premium for all of these games and although the system did come with a quite impressive Virtua Fighter game your expenses were only beginning as any additional games were going to cost you an additional $50. The titles weren't particularly good either. In fact, it is generally thought that all of the launch titles were pretty poor with the exception of Panzer Dragoon - which is widely regarded as perhaps the best game that was ever on that system.
It looks pretty lame now but for anyone that enjoyed Starfox this game looked like it was going to be the shit. It was also an RPG and somewhat open-world. If there was anything that tempted me to perhaps get involved with this overpriced system it was Panzer.
While this second reason may sound a bit lame it was still a factor. The Saturn was an absolute beast of a machine. It was friggin huge. Bigger is not necessarily better and later, when compared to the much smaller (and cheaper) Playstation, the Saturn just seemed clunky and obsolete even though I didn't even know anyone that had one.
I would later feel the same way about the Xbox, which as far as I can remember was by far the bulkiest console I have ever owned. At least the Saturn didn't have overheating issues like the Xbox did.
It wasn't just me that felt this way, the Saturn sold pretty poorly despite having a relatively massive head start on Sony and things didn't get better once the Playstation was released. Even though Sega cut the price of the Saturn later to the point where they were losing money when they sold a unit, they couldn't give these things away. To this day I don't know anyone who ever owned this thing.
Some people say that the over-extension of the life of the Genesis was the first step to Sega's demise as a home console provider and this may be true. However, I think the ill-conceived unveiling of the Saturn may have been when they truly went down the wrong path. By the time they released the Dreamcast years later, the industry had basically lost all faith in Sega and they would soon shut down most of the company on a global scale.
You can see from the cropped graph above that the Saturn was the most expensive system of the 90's and early 2000's when inflation is factored in. This chart is pretty old so it may no longer be true and I also cropped the graph so as to not include absurd systems like the cd-i and Neo Geo that nobody really paid any attention to.
I was a Sega fanboi in the 80's and 90's but the Saturn just killed all of that. A lot of people try to point the finger at Sony for Sega's demise but I think it was probably more likely self-inflicted wounds due to poor management.