What If the Nintendo Play Station was actually released?

The Sega Saturn

The distinguished competition

That's all well and good, but what about Sega? Or Microsoft, who would eventually enter the arena in the following generation?

When Sega released the Saturn in the US - and after the debacles of the Sega CD and 32X (the less said about that last one, the better) - Sony was actually the competition they feared the most. The PlayStation and Saturn's sales were pretty close in Japan, and the Nintendo 64 was still two years away. Sega made the mistake of releasing the Saturn to the US market a good four months earlier than planned, leaving both customers and developers surprised and ill prepared.

It was the beginning of the end for Sega's hardware business. It's hard to say if Sega would have made the same move if a CD-based Nintendo console had been released around the same time. Waiting would have meant a better hardware launch, more than likely meaning more success and improved consumer confidence following the failure of the Genesis add-ons. (My prediction is that the reputation that those add-ons gave Sega possibly would have still hurt the Saturn's sales here as they did in our timeline, but not nearly as much.)

As for Microsoft and their Xbox, it's really a toss up depending on the success of their competitors. If all three consoles were performing well financially, they may simply consider the market not worth getting into. They could have very well began concentrating on the even-then growing PC gaming market. But, we'll get to that.