Old gamers enjoy telling tales of a time when home video game consoles didn’t have names like Playstation or Xbox, and Sony and Microsoft were known for the Walkman and Windows, respectively.

Back then, Nintendo and Sega were the big players, and while both have seen better days, Sega is the company that has plunged the furthest, knocked from its perch as a leader in the home console market before fleeing that business arena completely.

And that’s the question Reddit user Treado48 asked in the Explain Like I’m 5 community: Why did Sega drop out of the video game console business?

Although the road to irrelevancy was filled with a series of misfires and miscalculations over the span of years, the simple truth concerning Sega’s downfall can be summed up like this: The company was a day late and a dollar short when it came to competing against the new kid on the block, Sony and its Playstation systems.

The beginning of the end for Sega began in the mid-1990s with the shift from 16-bit consoles, such as the Sega Genesis, to next-gen 32-bit machines. In 1995, Sony launched its Playstation and went head to head with Sega’s new system, the Saturn. The Playstation dominated the home console market for the rest of the decade, and over the years, Sega’s Saturn loss ground to Nintendo, which released its 64-bit N64 in 1996. A big reason for Saturn’s flameout came from the software end, with the system being hard to design games for and Sega’s inability to work with third-party developers to create an extensive game library.

The “game over” screen flashed for Sega, though, with the 1999 release of the Dreamcast, the company’s entry into the 64-bit market. Even though it went on sale a year earlier than Sony’s Playstation 2, the Dreamcast couldn’t attract the sales it needed to be profitable, despite games such as Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, and a new Sonic the Hedgehog title.

“In essence, it was a pure matter of cost,” former Sega marketing exec Tadashi Takezaki told the video game site Polygon in 2013 when asked about the Dreamcast’s sales woes. “It was because we were forced into a discount war when we were already losing money on system sales. … We couldn’t easily cut costs on manufacturing, the software wasn’t selling the numbers it used to, and then we were forced to discount the system.”

Sony’s new Playstation 2 system also had two things going for it that the Dreamcast didn’t—features casual and hardcore gamers were eagerly anticipating: The PS2 would be able to play older Playstation games, and it would play the newest home movie format.

In 2001, Sega dropped out of the home console market and focused on software. Even that transition wasn’t easy. The damage done by the disastrous decisions of the previous years required Sega to get a $500 million loan from a major shareholder in order to stay afloat, according to Eurogamer.net. That same chairman waived repayment of the loan on his deathbed, and he even gave Sega his personal stock shares in the video game company, as well as the shares in his own business, after he died of cancer in 2001.