Was the Saturn Sega's biggest failure?

>>3345617
If you want to take it simple, Sega felt they are too powerful after Genesis.
But they weren't to support fails.

Bad decisions:

1) Building a 2D powerhouse for a 3D era
2) Bad marketing (no flagships at launch, etc)
3) Rushed release (overpriced, no flagships)
4) Withholding jap games from western market
5) Not wooing 3rd party devs

Having said all of that, I don't think ANY established videogame company could have withstood Sony's assault on the market, Sony were ON FIRE, they did absolutely everything right, the hardware, the software deals, the marketing... The only way Sega could have competed is by doing everything Sony did, six months before Sony did it.

Even if the Dreamcast was not killed Microsoft would still have entered the console market.

They felt threatened by Sony taking all the game developers away from windows PC.

>>3345742
Yup. This sums things up.

Sega of Japan should've listened to Tom Kalinske and outsourced the Genesis successor to Sony.

>>3345617
I think their biggest issue is oversaturation.
We're talking about 8 different systems on the market at once in 1994/1995 I believe, that includes Pico and Genesis and 32X and Saturn.

Sega wasn't conservative enough, they didn't have any actual firm base of quality support while Nintendo had like 30 stellar franchises.

>>3345617
What's really sad is when you think about how little the Dreamcast needed to survive. It only needed a few more million consoles sold to remain profitable.

>>3345913
I asked the mall Santa for a Sega Dreamcast but he didn't know what that was.

Fuck.

>>3345742
>1) Building a 2D powerhouse for a 3D era

It was a transitional era; and having strong 2d made sense for a lot of reasons, including Segas own rich heritage of 2d games and in-house built 2d arcade hardware, wanting to one-up the SNES in hardware abilities, and arcades still getting tons of great 2d titles.

The biggest problem was that the sprite scaler in the Saturn was complicated to use, had less features (or features gimped by its complicated setup), and had less than a third of the speed of the Playstation gpu. If the Saturn vdp1 would have been powerful enough, then there would not have been any problems - even if it kept using quads.

>2) Bad marketing (no flagships at launch, etc)

The marketing was crap, but it did have Panzer Dragoon, Virtua Fighter, Daytona, all at launch.

>3) Rushed release (overpriced, no flagships)

The rushed release was the biggest problem, but not because of the lack of games or the price. But simply because they did not have a big enough inventory. They could only ship to a few stores. The ones they did not ship to, they thought that Sega had exclusive deals with the other stores... and so they stopped carrying all Sega stuff altogether.

This is also the reason why the SNES easily overtook the Genesis from 1995 onwards in sales. No one carried Sega game anymore.

> 4) Withholding jap games from western market

This was a direct result of their awful launch. They had a small user base, so they could not get back the localization costs for anything but the biggest AAA titles that sold well enough. The problem got worse on both ends as time went on, with more good Japanese titles coming out, and a shrinking US market share that was not worth localizing titles for.

Sega fucked up because they kept putting additions to old hardware to the point that nobody trusted them anymore

>>3345742
>>3345998

>5) Not wooing 3rd party devs

They were trying to, but needed more time for the dev tools to mature, since the Saturn was a brand new arch. So the dev support became piss poor compared to the mature Genesis tools. And once the Saturn market share dropped, it made no sense to keep up dev support; so from an outside perspective it looked like as if support never got any good.

>I don't think ANY established videogame company could have withstood Sony's assault on the market, Sony were ON FIRE, they did absolutely everything right, the hardware, the software deals, the marketing...

True, they basically allowed devs to do anything at a small cost. Similar to how Google dominated the mobile market with Android.
And back then, Sony was a brand with huge goodwill associated to their name (that got tarnished heavily later on).

Also, they actually did not allow devs to release games that were better on the Saturn - in the US, anyway. That's why they did not allow a lot of pure 2d titles, and why they did not allow for Lobotomy to port Quake 1 to the Playstation (because the Saturn port was stellar and they did not want to risk the PSX version turning out worse - even if according to the devs, it would've run better on the PSX).

>The only way Sega could have competed is by doing everything Sony did, six months before Sony did it.

nah, they would've lost in the US either way. The hardware was too different, and Sony actively encouraged devs to do things that made the Saturn look shit. Plus they had better support and better deals for devs.

They could've done a lot better though, and the Saturn easily had 2-3 more years in it.

>>3345867

And let Sony get all the profit?

too many consoles and additions too soon, vgenesis, cd, 32x saturn dreamcast. VMU's were expensive, nobody had games etc.

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I BELIEVE!!
That the 32X did more damage to consumer's loyalty for Sega than the Saturn.

>>3347428
I don't. Nobody had one considering everyone knew the Saturn was coming, and they pulled it of the shelves pretty quick.
No, what killed Sega was pissing off developers and retailers with a rushed release, pushing the system in stores before anyone was able to back it up, right after they did it with the 32X which no one at Sega itself really liked, but was pushed forward by the Japanese branch as to spite the American branch in order to take some of the heat off their shoulders by overbearing bosses that were verbally and even physically abusing their staff for not doing as well locally as they were doing overseas.
Sega started to make mistakes and crumbled because traditional Japanese business culture puts stern honor over actually doing good business and treating your staff well, which can lead to cancerous results. Just look at what happened at Konami.

>>3347428
The 32X was just a retards solution to a dying console. They should have released the Neptune and gave the Saturn an additional year or so to cook in development and launched the Saturn alongside the N64.

>>3348603
>this
especially since, by all accounts, the Saturn was a bitch to program for and seriously underpowered. I wonder how much they could have streamlined and refined the system, if they had more time to develop games for it. or, at least, get good development tools out for the thing.

Honestly, though, the Genesis was pathetically underpowered, compared to the SNES, and Sega still managed to go toe-to-toe with Nintendo. I also have a feeling that if the US branch had been allowed to do whatever it took, the Saturn could have been a success.

Arcades were still a force in gaming, in those days. the Saturn was pulling off arcade perfect ports back when the Playstation was struggling to handle games like Darkstalkers. Perfect arcade ports and tons of sports games, plus the best of what Japan was putting out could have secured Sega a pretty decent user base. Also, Sony had a hateboner for 2D. Sega could have rushed in and picked up all those bitter gamers who still liked 2D games. That's why I bought a Saturn, actually.

A bigger user base means more developers rushing in to make games to sell to those users. more games, more customers, which means more games, which means more customers

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>>3348638
>Honestly, though, the Genesis was pathetically underpowered, compared to the SNES,

>>3348727
He's right. The only bad thing about the SNES is its CPU, which got remedied by various chips, like SA-1 and SFX.

>>3348638
The Mega Drive came out two years earlier yet still outsold the technically superior Snes.

>>3348830
>outsold
Sure it did, Australia-kun. Nobody cared about the SNES until DKC came out.

Real talk - all this stuff about Sega's numerous fuck ups during the development of the Saturn is mostly irrelevant.

Sony was simply unstoppable at the time. Sony would have won 5th gen even if Sega focused on content and the Mega CD and 32X never existed.

I was a Sega kid and I wanted a Saturn.

All the Sega kids I knew wanted a Saturn.

However, your parents go to the store and see a video game console by Sony or Sega, which brand do you think they'll buy for their children? Keep in mind the Sony console is $100 cheaper.

>>3348839
I'm not Australian. It's a fact that both globally and in the US and Europe that the Mega Drive outsold the Snes.
In Europe DKC was the most popular Snes game. It came out at a time when the Mega Drive was losing its popularity and allowed the Snes to lead monthly sales for a brief time.

>>3348843
How did the Mega CD not existing have affected the success of the Saturn? It came out four years before it.

>>3348843
I was a Sega kid and didn't know anything about the Saturn. I only saw it once at Toys R Us, in about 96 or so. It disappeared from the shelves by the time I finally got a PlayStation in 98.

>>3348858
My big brother saved up for a saturn fairly early on, I remember we drove down with him and he entered the store, he came out with a ps1. The storekeep had told him it was the better option, it had better graphics and was $100 cheaper so it just seemed obvious. I suppose he was right, Pal saturns are fucking hopeless.

>>3345742
> Building a 2D powerhouse for a 3D era
I feel like they built it not knowing how 3d will take off. I remember 3d being basically an overnight thing. perhaps they used data they collected from the response of virtua racing and fighter and thought it was gonna be gimmicky. i feel like they had no idea 3d would drive the market.

>>3348843
>Sony was simply unstoppable at the time.
Yes, because Sega fucked up.
You said it yourself, Playstation was 100 cheaper.

>>3348638
>by all accounts, the Saturn was a bitch to program for and seriously underpowered.

It wasn't hard to program (the SH2 compilers Sega supplied were the best in the world).

What was difficult, was getting good performance out of the machine - optimizing your code so it uses the slave CPU, to feed the VDP1 at the right intervals, perhaps to use the SCU DSP.

The devkits did not have enough useful example programs for all of those till later on, when everyone stopped giving a shit about it.

>the Genesis was pathetically underpowered, compared to the SNES,

No, the Genesis was insanely overpowered for its time, the SNES only had a few more modern features. But if you compare speed and flexibility of the video hardware, the Genesis wins hands down.

>>3348892
> I remember 3d being basically an overnight thing.

Nah, they planned it from the beginning to be able to run Virtua Fighter at home, using a System 32 VDP, and the DSP to do the 3d T&L.

>>3346006
This. There was a lot of doubt back in the day about Sega's direction with consoles. They released a 32X, cancelled the Neptune and cancelled other projects (although unknown what they exactly were, word still came out stuff got canceled).
Third party developers weren't convinced by all of this and things slowed down.