"For example, the Sega Saturn (from my understanding) was ridiculously hard to program for, and consequently a lot of the games for it were objectively worse th

"For example, the Sega Saturn (from my understanding) was ridiculously hard to program for, and consequently a lot of the games for it were objectively worse than their PlayStation counterparts" And then, interestingly, Sony repeated Sega's mistake with the PS3 which arguably lead to a lot of the success of the Xbox 360 in non-Japanese markets. In the current generation, both consoles made the right choices in terms of ease of development, but Microsoft still got themselves off to a rocky start with the whole digital-downloads-only decision that they later backed off from. To be honest, I think their decision there was ultimately the one that is going to be standard in the future, they just pushed too hard, too fast when the market wasn't ready for such a big change.