Editing Sega Saturn (section)

===End of an era===
As price drops continued throughout the 32-bit era, the system board design of the Saturn was not as easy to condense in a cost-saving manner, and thus [[Sega]] fell behind after Nintendo and Sony reduced their respective consoles' price tags. As a marketing strategy, Sega bundled three of its best selling games (''Daytona USA'', ''Virtua Cop'', ''Virtua Fighter 2'') with the Saturn in an attempt to keep the more expensive system competitive with its rivals. This was not entirely successful, as gamers preferred to purchase game titles of their own choice instead and turned to the cheaper options yet again.

By early 1997, the Saturn was trailing the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation in both North America and Europe to such an extent that senior management began planning a new platform. By E3 in 1997, talk of the system called the "Katana" had begun, which would later be renamed as the [[Dreamcast]]. [[Sega/Sega of America|Sega of America]] CEO Bernie Stolar, who was strongly in favour of the upcoming console, announced that "the Saturn is not [Sega's] future".

As Sega began public discussion about their next system, barely two years after having launched the Saturn, it ironically became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with some citing it as an example of the Osborne effect. This move, combined with Sega's recent history of short-lived consoles, led to a chain reaction that quickly caused the Saturn's future to collapse. Immediately following the announcement, sales of the console and software substantially tapered off in the second half of 1997, with many planned games being canceled as well. While this allowed Sega to focus on bringing out its successor, the premature demise of the Saturn caused them many financial problems. Even though the [[Dreamcast]] did address many of the problems with the Saturn, Sega's bad reputation caused customers and publishers alike to be skeptical and holdout to see how the console would fare against [[Sony Interactive Entertainment|Sony]]'s [[PlayStation 2]] and [[Nintendo]]'s [[Nintendo GameCube|GameCube]].

The aggressive move to replace the Saturn resulted in a rift between Sega and many of their third-party developers and publishers. North American developers were already hostile to the Saturn because it was difficult to program for, along with them being left out by its early release, so the future project alienated what remaining support Sega had in that region. However, many Japanese developers had strongly supported the Saturn in its homeland and saw little reason for Sega to rush another platform to market. The announcement caused a substantial drop in software sales, causing frustrated third parties to cancel many planned releases. The early abandonment of the Saturn hurt third party software support not only for that system, but for Sega as a whole. Several major publishers, such as Electronic Arts, declined to support the upcoming [[Dreamcast]], which played a part in its discontinuation as well.

The games planned to be released in North America or Europe that were canceled included highly anticipated titles such as ''[[Sonic X-treme]]'', ''Policenauts'' and ''Lunar: Silver Star Story''. A chain reaction of cancellations transformed the 1998 schedule of released games down to a minimum with titles like ''Steep Slope Sliders'', ''Panzer Dragoon Saga'', ''Burning Rangers'', ''The House of the Dead'', ''Shining Force III'' (only part one of the three-part series), and ''Magic Knight Rayearth''.

The Saturn was discontinued in 1998 in most countries, with Japan following in 2000.<ref name="book"/><ref name="gamepro"/>