> This, along with the fact that salaries are absurdly low, shows a lack of interest by the Brazilian government, people, and industry, in the development of science in this country.
No, it shows that the country is poor - the desire to pay higher salaries was always there, but it's hard. People in rich countries think money grows on trees because for them, it kind of does.
And this is why development advice from "intellectuals" in rich countries is worthless.
It seems like the main problem they ran into was that the service appealed mainly to the small minority of "heavy players" (who they defined as playing more than 14 hours per week). Their original projections were that they could target cable subscribers who own Genesis systems and play games more than 4 hours a week, but they found that most people who weren't gaming fanatics preferred to own a few games and rent games as needed rather than subscribe to Sega Channel.
The other big problem they ran into was parental resistance. A large amount of parents they talked to viewed Sega Channel as an "open tap" that would increase their child's time spent playing games. An ongoing subscription also was only a one-time "give" from the parent to the child, whereas buying/renting games was one "give" per occasion, which was more psychologically attractive to the parents.