Mind you there are roughly over 100 tiger handhelds based on different properties and not counting the Tiger original ones which were usually sports related. If something was big in the 90's it usually got a tiger handheld game. What ruined Tiger was a good many failed attempts at making a real console or portable. With that they charged real console prices and compared to Sega, Sony, and Nintendo they couldn't cut it.
I actually did some research on this, since your earlier post interested me. This is partly true, but there's more to it, and it's interesting to see what went wrong.
By 1994, Tiger's dominance was starting to fade. The Game Boy had come way down in price due to age and mass-production, and the Game Boy had a massive, massive library of actual games now. Tiger had held on for quite a while on their own merits, but Nintendo was gaining ground every day and with used game shops like FuncoLand and MicroPlay being a thing you could potentially get a Game Boy for really, really cheap. The way Tiger's market model had gone was undercutting the competition as hard as they possibly could, but there really wasn't many ways they could slash costs further.
The idea to create an LCD handheld with interchangeable cartridge was a win-win solution. Not only would they be able to appeal to this market segment but they could reduce the cost of their games even further. To do this, Tiger used a tactic that would later be used by the Pop Station variants: swappable screens as cartridges. In the process, they secured a new agreement with Sega since the Game Gear was doing particularly badly. So when Tiger got word that Nintendo was working on the Virtual Boy, they hit the ground running. Tthe R-Zone sold for a mere $30 new, undercutting both Nintendo's Virtual Boy and the original Game Boy, and it actually did quite well, but the R-Zone ultimately was killed by its own marketing. The commercials attempted to make it seem like some revolutionary new device, which really wasn't what the R-Zone was. If Tiger had marketed it corectly - an improved version of their LCD games - and gone with a better form-factor (like the Super System version they released later), the R-Zone may have actually caught on. As it happened, however, Tiger's issues with the R-Zone would lead to it failing with its other console attempt.
Tiger eventually had a brilliant idea and tried to market a new system in the Game.com, one last attempt to compete with the original Game Boy. Conceptually, it was solid, acquiring really robust third-party support that would make any launch console excited, and it had a number of features that the Game Boy didn't, including allowing it to be used as an organizer. This was a solid idea. Scrimping on the tech to save a tiny bit of cash, however, was a fucking disaster.
Tiger came
dangerously close to making a good game system, and one that if it had managed to hold the line, probably would have carved out its own niche. There are several Game.com games that have solid gameplay design and look good, but handle like complete dog shit because the Game.com runs at like 3 frames per second. Resident Evil 2 on Game.com is a great example of a game that has a fantastic setup (a 2D-ified demake of the classic) that comes painfully close to being a good game, and ultimately doesn't work because the hardware chugs trying to run the fucking thing.
Much like Blockbuster Video, they got in too late and they didn't go balls-deep when they should have. If Tiger had cut their losses on the R-Zone after that season and had thrown everything behind the Game.com, not only would it likely would have done well enough to stick around for a little while longer, but with Tiger's existing contracts, we would have seen a lot more third-party development on the system. Instead, it took too long, and came out almost a year after Pokemon released and assured Nintendo would have market dominance
forever in that sphere.
