Sure, but given that they also had the CoreGrafx and CoreGrafx II it seems quite pointless.
Then this must seem completely ridiculous to you:
First, I wasn't the one to first mention the Shuttle, I just agreed that it didn't make much sense.
Second, and more importantly, most of those are just recolors, and even the Pikachu N64 is fully compatible with all N64 accessories. This is, of course, not true with the PCE Shuttle, and it's got to be its biggest weakness. A TG16 that can't attach to a CD drive and that also needs its own custom save backup unit because it's incompatible with the usual backup boosters, too? Oh come on, that's just silly. And counter-intuitive, when NEC's main focus shortly afterwards became selling CD units and Duos!
I have yet to find a single reliable-looking number for sales of any particular Japanese hucard, which pretty much brings my data-based analysis to a close. I'll chime in real quick on all the hubbub about add-ons and the Arcade Card, though.
On one hand, I think that the PCE-CD expansion and the Super System Card 3.0 are both examples of add-ons that actually worked, and undoubtedly improved the fate of the system(s) they became part of. The 3.0 Card in particular seems like quite a gamble when you think about it, but everyone pulled completely on the same rope, and it all worked out. Interestingly, if you check a release list, you can see how within about 1 year of the 3.0 system coming out, a significant majority of PCE releases were SCD games.
On the other hand, the Arcade Card was probably not the best idea in the world. It's just that it wound up not mattering much anyway.
See, if NEC had had their act together, they would have released a system with a fighting chance against the Saturn and the Playstation. What they actually released - the PC-FX - was so terrible that it didn't sell as much in three years as the competition sold in literally a few days. But imagine a scenario where NEC had a viable all-around strategy. Part of that has to consist of rallying their fan-base around their next generation console. And of course, one of the most important parts of getting your fans to make that transition is gracefully winding down the previous generation system.
For both consumers and developers, the Arcade Card would have been a distraction, and it would have diverted resources away from the PC-FX and the Super CD system just like the 32X did with the Saturn and the Genesis. That's why however much they are embraced in the PCE library, most of the Arcade Card games...like Fatal Fury2, Art of Fighting, Sapphire...these should have been PC-FX games. And they should have been running on a much better PC-FX.
Yeah, I agree with just about everything you say here. I do think that there is merit to solid game support late in a system's life, though; the SNES had great years from 1994 to 1996, and later in Japan. Of course that system released years later, though, but still, it's in the same generation... still though, you don't want to distract people with new addons too close to the next generation, that is true. Not wanting to distract things from the real next-gen platform is the reason why Star Fox 2 was never released, of course, even though it was finished; Nintendo decided that 3d games would be for the N64, not the SNES.
Sega of course messed up everything for themselves with their stupid decisions, but their worst decisions were in the West, not in Japan. It's easy enough to see that Sega faded in the mid '90s because of terrible strategy mistakes surrounding the 32X and Saturn in the West. For NEC, though, I'm not as sure; they just didn't seem to have any momentum. I suspect that messing up their next-gen strategy so badly really hurt them -- once the PC-FX was released and clearly no one cared, I would guess that it helped drag down the Duo as well. I mean, even though I'm sure 4th gen sales declined for everyone, and even if that 1.8 number is from very late 1994, selling only 120,000 systems in 1995-1997 is pretty bad, considering that they'd sold almost 1.8 million from 1988 to whatever point in 1994 that article was published in. I don't think that you can explain that whole decline just with that the next generation had started. For sales from 1996 on, sure, that'd explain it there... but 1995? There were still many major 4th gen titles released on all platforms in 1995 in both the US and Japan. So yeah, my guess is that the PC-FX strategy debacle may have hurt them. Perhaps losing the Western market hurt them as well; even small Western sales of TG16/CD games were better than nothing? Maybe those weren't enough to matter past the first years of the TG16, though. That's sadly likely, I guess. And need I even mention how incredibly stupid never releasing anything officially in Europe was...
As for the Arcade Card, there I'm less sure. The Arcade Card wasn't as expensive, bulky, or annoying (three power bricks!) as the 32X, and Japan was clearly much more accepting of limited-support addons than the West was, so I'm sure the Arcade Card didn't hurt NEC like the 32X did Sega in the US. Of course, the 32X didn't hurt Sega there as much either, though that was probably more because the Saturn was already out and people just ignored it; the Genesis hadn't sold that great after all. Still, the Arcade Card did split the market again, and late in the generation, a time when they surely needed sales. That's rarely a good thing unless there's a very good reason for it. The Super System Card, yes, that was handled perfectly. The Arcade Card? Not so much.
However, 4th gen consoles did need plenty of major releases in 1994 and 1995. Even in Japan, I don't think that 5th gen hardware sales REALLY got hot until 1996-1997... by late '95 it was starting, but at least through that year there was a definite place for major 5th gen releases. And on the SNES, there was a place for major releases all the way until 1999! Of course the SNES crushed all other platforms in sales in Japan, so it makes sense that it'd get several more years of software support than the competition (and indeed it did), but still, NEC has to have been able to do better. They had some good games, but some of them were Arcade Card only and thus could only sell to the limited audience that had actually bought the things, and many of Hudson's top mass-market titles in 1994-1995 were on SNES and Saturn, not TCD or PCFX -- an obvious sign of lack of confidence in their consoles. A better next-gen strategy and platform, no Arcade Card, maybe a bit more later HuCard support (abandoning 60% of your market... even if CDs are better, I just don't know if that was the best move...)... I don't know. But with NEC (and Hudson it seems) really attached to the idea of FMV as the basis for their next console, NEC was doomed. There's no way to save them with the PC-FX existing, and as I said, I expect that its failure helped take down the PC Engine itself sooner too. Maybe not (the SNES probably eventually faded in Japan simply because of its age, not because the N64 had failed so badly there...), but it's definitely possible, anyway.
But yeah, as I said, best would be a Super System Card with more RAM on it, and no Arcade Card. Trying to get people to upgrade again in 1994 was just too late in the generation...
That's also kind of the problem.
I mean, there are a few ways that NEC could have approached the PC-FX. Maybe they could have made the anime-heavy digital-comic-book/pseudo-RPG thing work if they made the hardware cheap, courted developers and put no limits on the content. But if they were going to use a conventional approach, they probably should have not only revised the hardware, but the software, too. The PCE was the first system with Street Fighter II, right? Why shouldn't its successor cash in on that fighting game heritage?
EDIT: By the way, if anyone wants to see a bunch of Japanese nerds talking about this same crap, here you go. Just beware, it ain't pretty:
http://anago.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/ghard/1397208601/
http://anago.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/ghard/1399556230/
The second thread is currently active.
Yeah, there's so much wrong with the PC-FX that it could only be "saved" by killing it and starting over with something better, really. If they'd gotten it out even earlier MAYBE they could have competed with the 3DO and Sega CD in the FMV-heavy-game category, but those were never as popular in Japan as they were here, so I doubt very much that that would have done much good, and they'd have died once the PS1 got popular anyway. And even the 3DO can do some polygons. No, they needed better, more up-to-date hardware, and a strategy to match; NEC's "we'll focus on anime otaku stuff" strategy wasn't a good one, obviously, as they learned once it failed.
How could you not understand what I meant by 'bump', especially in relation to SF2, and be part of the PCE community? 
Hucard bumps are famous. People have been curious for years, what was under those bumps.
Oh yeah. Of course. :p I guess I was thinking that since we now do know what's under them, it's not such a big deal... and anyway, the Super System Card and Populous used the 'bump' card before SFII, so it wasn't something made just for that game.
