The Sega Saturn had a pretty complicated hardware architecture. I can understand that scaling out the game "work" into multiple CPUs and dedicated processors makes sense from a cost-benefit perspective, but I'm sure this contributed to the Saturn's relatively poor sales.

Many people said that ultimately it was hard for companies to justify the investment in learning it all to make games that fully utilize the hardware. Somehow this reminds me of Sid Meier's saying that the player must have fun, not the game developer - and in this case, perhaps the hardware designers were having too much fun!