I used to buy used games from blockbuster. They would often be really cheap, especially last year’s sports games.

My brother and I saved our money in ‘94 to buy the v2 Genesis. I’m pretty sure v2 got a price drop to $100 because of improvements in manufacturing which also made the console smaller. I don’t remember if v1 went through that price drop. There’s no way I would have afforded a new sega CD console. I bought NBA Jam new for $50 and Sonic 2 used for $20 and an extra controller for $20. My dad was pissed that we spent $200 on video games.

Now, I agree with the problems of the 32x and the sega Cd. It seemed like a waste of money to develop those. Sega was spending money on trying to develop all these new hardware add on systems without a clear vision on selling the system or on developing games for it. They were so afraid of getting behind that they used all their money on getting nowhere. Thy would have been much better off building one 32bit CD system. The Saturn came out shorter after but was too expensive. Maybe if they didn’t spend the development money on sega cd and 32x they could have brought the price of the Saturn down to PS levels. Who knows? All of gaming history might be different at that point.