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Businesses Sony Games Hardware

Is Sega the Next Atari? 153

Posted by samzenpus from the once-false-step dept.
donniebaseball23 writes As CEO of Sega of America in the early 1990s, Tom Kalinske oversaw the company during its glory days, when all eyes in the industry were glued to the titanic struggle for console superiority between the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Times have changed, to put it mildly, and Sega is now a shell of its former self. Where did things go wrong? According to Kalinske, Sega's downfall was failing to partner with Sony on a new platform, and the bad decisions kept piling on from there. Sega's exit from hardware "could have been avoided if they had made the right decisions going back literally 20 years ago. But they seem to have made the wrong decisions for 20 years."
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Is Sega the Next Atari? More

Is Sega the Next Atari?

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  • Question In Headline (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @02:49PM (#49114117)

    Answer is "no".

    SEGA is not "the next Atari". They've been a fucking dead husk for over a decade.

    • Re:Question In Headline (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @03:14PM (#49114339)

      I suspect we largely agree on the generalities, but I'd have said "yes". Sega is on life support, but not quite dead. Atari has died, was buried, resurrected like a zombie, and is in the process of dying a second time. Both companies made bad decision after bad decision, causing the collapse of their companies. Sega seems to be following in Atari's footsteps quite handily, the only difference being that Atari had a nice head start on them.

      I always wonder what it is about businesses that seem unable to do just about anything to turn themselves around versus more successful ones. Simply the guy at the helm? The corporate culture? A too-entrenched bureaucracy? How does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?

      The article talks about how a brand like Atari can survive in a new home, but what's the point of that? It can be resurrected and slapped onto new products, but unless those new products actually reflect what made the brand successful in the first place, it will eventually wither and die again, just like before. It's a recipe for a short term fix and subsequent fall. If anything, a "new branding" simply indicates a company's lack of confidence in their ability to make their own name a recognized and successful brand.

      • Re:Question In Headline (Score:5, Insightful)

        by frank_adrian314159 ( 469671 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @04:17PM (#49114613) Homepage

        How does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?

        A conundrum for the ages to be sure, but my humble opinion?

        Ahem... A company that makes bad decision after bad decision does not understand the difference between a good decision and a bad decision.

        Do I win a prize?

        • Re:Question In Headline (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @05:50PM (#49115205)

          You should totally write a book. You'll make millions!

          It seems like a lot of people in upper management get so caught up in trying to figure out how to extract money for their customers rather than intently focusing on a product that people will willingly part with their money to obtain. Lenovo is a great recent example [slashdot.org]. Contrast that with Apple, who's customers often display an incredible amount of brand loyalty, despite the premium price of their products.

          Not too surprisingly, the top leadership of Sega Japan was largely made up of old men who probably didn't actually play videogames themselves. I don't see how you can make good decisions for a game development company if you don't play videogames yourself, or at the very least, if you don't really listen to people within your company that do. It's pretty obvious that didn't happen enough.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by chthon ( 580889 )

          In that case they should at least make a good decision every now and then, due to randomness.

      • I always wonder what it is about businesses that seem unable to do just about anything to turn themselves around versus more successful ones. Simply the guy at the helm? The corporate culture? A too-entrenched bureaucracy? How does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?

        I think one reason is that when Company A has a product and strategy (and/or lockin) that works, Company B often has to try a different path to differentiate their product, or have to do things differently because of patents, whatever. Often that different path is not optimal, but the optimal path is not open.

        sr

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nelson ( 1275 )

        I always wonder what it is about businesses that seem unable to do just about anything to turn themselves around versus more successful ones. Simply the guy at the helm? The corporate culture? A too-entrenched bureaucracy? How does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?

        This is a truly fascinating question. I have a theory that a company like Sega can't turn around because

        1. a) they have drank too much of their own koolaid to maybe do something different and
        2. b) they experience

        • "Drinking your own koolaid" definitely has to be on the list. People are, for whatever reason, often unable to see their own failings and mistakes, choosing instead to blame other factors or others around them. When presented with incontrovertible evidence, they'll start equivocating, blaming the messenger, or will simply refuse to accept the fact for any number of reasons.

          I'd also say that "fear of risk" is on the list. Successful big gambles look incredibly obvious in hindsight, but failed gambles can

      • for all the complaining about how bad Sonic Boom is people forget that Sonic 2006 was wildly profitable. From a business standpoint it's hard to argue with that. Sonic Boom is awful, but not much worse/glitchy than 2006 was. Then there's Aliens:Colonial Marines. Gear Box ripped them off. Period. It's painfully obvious that they took Sega's money and spent it on Borderlands 2. It would cost more to litigate that than Sega would ever get back though, so they're screwed. You could argue Sega should have kept a

        • Then there's Aliens:Colonial Marines. Gear Box ripped them off. Period. It's painfully obvious that they took Sega's money and spent it on Borderlands 2. It would cost more to litigate that than Sega would ever get back though, so they're screwed. You could argue Sega should have kept a closer eye on Gearbox, but games like Aliens:CM were Gearbox's bread and butter. It's ridiculous that they'd pull that on Sega, since it pretty much burns every bridge they'll ever have in the industry.

          It sounds like Sega kept a closer eye on Creative Assembly during the development of Alien: Isolation, likely because they had gotten burned by Gearbox.

          Then again, Alien: Isolation is its own problem. While it sold over a million copies, Sega was hoping that it would sell much, much more than that.

          Alien: Colonial Marines likely didn't help these sales numbers. I know I was initially hesitant on getting Alien: Isolation due to how poor Colonial Marines was..

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RyoShin ( 610051 )

        ow does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?

        In the case of SEGA, I think another interview with Tom Kalinski [sonicretro.org] spoke volumes about the problem: Sega of Japan. The interview touches on the fact that SEGA partnered with Sony to create a CD peripheral but cut their ties before it was complete. Nintendo also did this, to make a peripheral for the SNES, and cut ties with Sony to partner with Philips (Sony found out about the change when Nintendo announced their partnership with Ph

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @06:17PM (#49115397)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Question In Headline (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @06:38PM (#49115527)

        This is a solid comment. I agree with all of it, but I wish you had emphasized how very ludicrous their hardware marketing was. As a gamer at the time (Nintendo), I was extraordinarily puzzled at the amount of hoops it took to even understand what the various Sega hardware was. It was extremely silly to assume that everyone had infinite space under their TV and tolerance for hardware outlays, CD/32-X were confusing anyway. Expensive hardware addon is always a risky play, because it means that any game made for it is just for the subsection of players that bought your base hardware and then bought your hardware addon, and those hardware addons NEVER seemed to be inexpensive in the first place.

        The other reason that it hurt them so bad was the social aspect. If you had decided you weren't going to buy the Genesis (and if you were a kid, that decision was mostly made by asking your parents for a DIFFERENT system to begin with), then you were already committed to not owning a Genesis. If you launch a fresh piece of hardware, you might grab the Nintendo guy for that generation, but if you keep building on the one he already chose, then he's already well into cognitive dissonance land- you would need to dominate the field so hard with technical expertise that no one could ignore you, and that just didn't happen.

        Also... I always found their marketing ludicrous. Console wars were always clannish, but Sega couldn't seem to stop insulting Nintendo players with their attitude of "play us and be cool, play them and be drool". "Personally insulting your potential customers based on their current console" definitely looked like it was their strategy for awhile. I never see this come up in any discussion, but it really did feel real at the time.

      • Additional stupidity; I remembered that by the time the 32X was announced in the UK, the (entirely incompatible) Saturn was already due for launch in the near future. Worse, I recently found out that in Japan, they actually launched at almost the same time.

        What was the point of that?! Who was going to buy the 32X knowing that it was a stop gap for something imminent/already here? Granted, the 32X was much cheaper at launch- which was apparently the justification- but anyone with half a brain would have kn
      • where the heck have you been. Here's a list of just some of the excellent games Sega made since the Dreamcast:

        Virtua Fighter 4
        Outrun 2/2006
        Virtua On Marz
        Yakuza (multiple games)
        Aliens vs Predator
        Aliens: Isolation
        The entire Total War Series
        Sonic Colors
        Sonic Generations
        Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Undead Rabbit
        Project Diva
        Seventh Dragon.

        I could go on. Yeah, Sega let some stinkers. But so did EA. See my post elsewhere in the thread for what really killed them.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • I was thinking the same thing.

            Sounds like they can make mobile games or something. Didn't they make sonic for the PS3 or WII or something

          • Um... All the "Virtua" games are developed in house. Freakin' Reiko Kodama (google her) made Seventh Dragon. They might not have made their last few racers but it's pretty clear from the graphics/style they had heavy input on all of them. Forza, made by the same studio as Outrun 2/2006 is a wildly different game. Yakuza's pure Sega too.

            OTOH you can see what happened when they tried the "hands off" approach with Aliens: Colonial Marines. The got taken for a ride. Too bad. After Gearbox patched it the game

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        Europe had it even worse. You have no idea how bad European Dreamcast game boxes were... Anyway, it's interesting to look at the whole thing from the Japanese point of view. They got all the best games and Sega is still doing pretty well with its arcade business over there. They had even more hardware too, but seem more willing to spend money on it.

        It made sense for Sega to become software only. Their strength was always their game development teams in Japan. It sucked for the west because a lot of the best

  • Sega's downfall was failing to partner with Sony on a new platform

    I thought the first playstation came about when Nintendo decided not to have Sony make a CD drive for their console. Did Sega really have a chance to make the same mistake?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I thought the first playstation came about when Nintendo decided not to have Sony make a CD drive for their console. Did Sega really have a chance to make the same mistake?

      Correct. Nintendo partnered with Sony to come up with a CD-ROM based platform, which ultimately Nintendo abandoned, and Sony continued development on.

      Sega, however, let Sony's marketing on the PS2 overwhelm them - the DreamCast came out about a year before the PS2 and was by all accounts a fairly capable at the time machine. Sony, whose d

      • Re:I thought that was Nintendo's failure... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @04:31PM (#49114685)

        Dreamcast had some issues that were hard to overcome that weren't just marketing related.

        1. The proprietary "GD-ROM" disc format. 1GB of storage space which was a fraction of what PS2 had with DVD's. It also didn't let people play DVD movies at a time when DVD movie players were still expensive.

        2. Incredibly easy piracy. Most of the games targeted for GD-ROM's were capable of fitting on a regular CD, and people figured out how to make easily burnable pirated games without even needing a modchip.

        #2 was a fluke, but #1 was just a bad decision in general. I honestly think if Dreamcast had shipped with a DVD drive Sega would still be making hardware.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ModelX ( 182441 )

          GD-ROM instead of DVD was not really the key problem, Dreamcast was buried by the developers before PS2 even launched!

          The key problem was trivial piracy and the stupid feature that rebooted the machine when swapping disks (who wants to play a 1GB CG intensive game).

          Also, many developers were porting to WinCE for Dreamcast, but that thing was buggy, like really buggy, like showstopping buggy. And then Microsoft withdrew support (or if they didn't officially in practice support was inadequate).

          When it was obv

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Guspaz ( 556486 )

            Sega had problems getting developers for the Dreamcast long before there were any piracy problems. They alienated developers by spitting out new incompatible hardware in a rapidfire format. The 32X was released shortly before the Saturn, and then the Saturn was abandoned early into its lifespan in favour of the Dreamcast. Between 1991 and 1998, Sega had a total of five different and incompatible hardware platforms on the market, six if you include the GameGear.

            By the time the Dreamcast rolled around, many d

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          Dreamcast had some issues that were hard to overcome that weren't just marketing related.

          2. Incredibly easy piracy. Most of the games targeted for GD-ROM's were capable of fitting on a regular CD, and people figured out how to make easily burnable pirated games without even needing a modchip.

          The thing is, easy piracy increases console sales.

          Microsoft knew this with the original Xbox. It was so easily modded that everyone bought one. Same with the PS2. When the PS3 came along they lost momentum because everything was just a huge pain in the arse.

          The Dreamcast was just a bad console with a serious dearth of good games. Even if it were just a bad console but had some good games it would have been enough to keep Sega going like Nintendo did with the Game Cube.

          • The thing is, easy piracy increases console sales.

            Maybe in Europe and the 2nd and 3rd world, but not in the US, CA, NZ, AU, UK and Japan. Which...not-surprisingly, are the places with low piracy rates where people are actually willing to buy games.

        • and all those videos of the cut scenes from Armored Core getting passed off as gameplay. Hell, there were videos of George Lucas saying the PS2 could render Episode I. I knew tonnes and tonnes of people who bought Sony's hype and didn't get a Dreamcast.

          And as someone who's burned discs in 2001 I wouldn't call piracy on the Dreamcast easy. You needed specific burning software, good quality discs and the know how to find isos. You've just taken out 95% of the market for piracy.

          On the other hand Sega's
        • I don't think piracy was that big of a factor. Sure, it required no modding... but it did require you to downloaded several hundred megabytes per game. The Dreamcast was released in 1999, so that means over dialup. I'm too lazy to do the math, but my guess-o-meter says you would have to tie up your phone line for the better part of a week to complete 1 game download. And hope you don't get disconnected, because then you have to start over...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Uberbah ( 647458 )

          Incredibly easy piracy.

          At a time when people were still on modems and a cd burner cost more than a Playstation 2?

          • Not really. College students have always been a key demographic for gaming, and almost all of them had broadband in 1999. Heck I was able to get 1Mbps DSL in the middle of nowhere a by 2001.

            Also - a CD burner back then cost about $75.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Uberbah ( 647458 )

              CD burners that cheap didn't come out until years after the Dreamcast was already dead. Piracy was an excuse in any case, as some of the most copied games were also the biggest money makers for their time: just look at Warcraft and Starcraft.

              Heck I was able to get 1Mbps DSL in the middle of nowhere a by 2001.

              And someone won the Powerball last week. Extraordinarily rare anecdotes do not a median make.

              • CD burners that cheap didn't come out until years after the Dreamcast was already dead.

                Sorry, but you're wrong on that, or didn't know how to shop. By the time Dreamcast came out CD-R's had been available for 10 years and had dropped in price significantly. I already had a CD burner (actually my second one) in my computer when I went to college the same year Dreamcast was released. It was less than $100 - bought on a part time minimum wage teenager's earnings.

                And someone won the Powerball last week. Extraordinarily rare anecdotes do not a median make.

                The point was that it wasn't extraordinarily rare. Broadband was very much available at the time the Dreamcast came out. Certainly

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Uberbah ( 647458 )

                  Sorry, but you're wrong on that, or didn't know how to shop. By the time Dreamcast came out CD-R's had been available for 10 years and had dropped in price significantly.

                  Only if you were living in Taiwan as the son of an electronics exec. And 4k screens have been out for 10 years and dropped in price significantly - but they're still rare and expensive. And yes, I do have fond memories of burning CD's in dorm rooms at the time - and it would cost me $3 bucks per disk plus pizza for the guy who had investe

  • Here's what happened (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23, 2015 @02:54PM (#49114177)

    Sega blew it with the Saturn. That's where it all went wrong. People will say that it started to go wrong with the 32X, but the 32X was never taken seriously, and sold very few units. Yeah, it was stupid, but it wasn't really important, either.

    The Saturn, though...basically Sega missed the boat on 3D, and the Playstation didn't. That was the beginning of the end. Then Sega had the Dreamcast, which was a great system hardware-wise, but they failed to get third-parties on board, and they didn't have enough games/momentum by the time the PS2 was announced. If the Dreamcast had come out a year earlier, it would've had a nice pile of games by the time the PS2 arrived, and they would've been in a better position.

    Essentially Sega moved too slowly in the mid-to-late 90s. I don't know if you can actually say they did anything *wrong*...they just didn't do a good enough job.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      By the time the Dreamcast came out, SEGA was already a dead man walking. The 32x and Saturn failures had taught developers that if they developed for SEGA hardware they wouldn't get sales and the platform would be abandoned quickly. The Dreamcast was a perfectly capable box but it was surrounded by the stench of death from SEGA HQ.

      Meanwhile Sony was following up their tremendous success on the PS1 with what was hyped up to be a technological tour-de-force with the PS2. Third party developers couldn't

      • Re:Here's what happened (Score:5, Insightful)

        by twistedsymphony ( 956982 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @04:41PM (#49114739) Homepage

        The final nail in the coffin is that SEGA's first party development teams were just kind of bad at their jobs.

        I beg to differ, Segas 1st party titles during the Dreamcast era were at the top of their game and produced titles and franchises that are STILL making them money re-selling on different platforms as many of them have become cult-classics. Crazy Taxi, House of the Dead 2, Jet Set Radio, Panzer Dragoon, Virtual On OT, Space Channel 5, Chu Chu Rocket, Shenmue, etc. Even their flagship driving game Metropolis Street Racer when on to spawn 4 sequels in the Form of Project Gotham Racing and was the Xbox's flagship driving game until Microsoft introduced Forza.

        The Sonic games released on the Dreamcast were actually rated fairly well and fairly well received by fans. Most consider them to be the first 3D Sonic titles made by Sega that didn't suck.
        Sonic Adventure on GameRankings scores an 86: http://www.gamerankings.com/dr... [gamerankings.com]
        Sonic Adventure 2 scores an 89 on MetaCritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game... [metacritic.com]

        • They're also the only 3D Sonic titles that didn't suck. Panzer Dragoon didn't get a Dreamcast game either, IIRC.

          As for the other games you mention, there's quite a few that weren't really "Dreamcast" games, but rather arcade ports - that's basically what kept the DC from having effectively zero third-party support, since they got amazing, accurate ports of what could be argued as the best arcade games out there at the time. Specifically, that relationship between NAOMI and Dreamcast also garnered them Capco

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      Sega couldnt get the trust of its reailers and its customers BEFORE saturn ever hit, 32x was a big reason behind that

      they couldnt all get on the same page, japan vs USA and everyone got pissed off being jerked around, from the sega CD, CDX, nomad and 32x oh fuck 32X here's saturn!!!

      too late

  • Before there was sony entering there was the Saturn - which is really what caused the demise of Sega. The Saturn was basically the genesis - but a bit better. But not enough better to merit mass purchase. The last ditch attempt at the Dreamcast was really solid, but then they protection on the disks was too poor and piracy was just too easy. Though, I still occasionally dust off the game gear, genesis, or even the saturn if I want nostalgia kick, but it's easy to see why they went to the wayside.
    • The biggest problem with the Saturn is that they surprise launched it, and pissed off the entire industry. No one wanted to deal with it, no one got exclusive deals.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      According to this article http://www.gamasutra.com/view/... [gamasutra.com] the demise of Sega was mainly caused by simply having not enough advertizing money to compete against bigger opponents, combined with a number of small mistakes in management.
      The original XBox was a far bigger failure than the Dreamcast but it managed to survive because the giant Microsoft was behind.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Guspaz ( 556486 )

        Microsoft went in expecting the Xbox to fail. They knew perfectly well what they were doing, which was buying their way into a well established an entrenched market. The money they dumped into the original Xbox was the cost of entry, so obviously they knew what they were getting into.

        The strategy worked, too. The Xbox 360 was a strong contender in the market, and captured nearly a third of a three-system market. Of course, they blew it this generation, but that doesn't say anything about their original stra

    • The Saturn was basically the genesis - but a bit better. But not enough better to merit mass purchase.

      The Saturn was basically equivalent to the playstation, except without transparency. That was a big fail. Also, it cost another hundred bucks. $300 for the playstation was a hell of a lot already.

      The Saturn was also a hot mess to code for, by all accounts. It has two CPUs and making use of them is your business. At least they're symmetric.

  • Sega isn't Sega anymore, literally (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kuukai ( 865890 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @03:01PM (#49114241) Journal
    In 2004, Sega was merged into Sammy, a gambling/arcade machine company, which then all but renamed itself to Sega. They have totally different business goals from the previous Sega. Any discussion about the direction Sega is going now should be framed in that context. Current Sega is working a different market. Nintendo is doing about as well at arcades as Sega is doing at console hardware. But it is interesting to consider what happened long before the merger with the Dreamcast and how it could have been prevented.

  • Nintendo is next.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... the writing is on the wall for console monopolies when computers are becoming a commodity everyday device. Nintendo should be experimenting now with porting some of it's lesser known games. It always complains that JRPG's sell poorly, well those of us who grew up on Nintendo and are now adults are not going to buy a console just to play a couple of rehashed JRPG's. They have lost long term customers constantly and only the die hard blinded fanboys remain, game quality has been going down little bits

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      "... the writing is on the wall for console monopolies when computers are becoming a commodity everyday device."

      Your comment is as retarded today as it was when it was first parroted some 20-odd years ago.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Nintendo is next.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Monday February 23, 2015 @06:08PM (#49115333)

      I wouldn't be so quick to write Nintendo off just yet.

      If we look at the 1998 .. 2010 year data from this console profit table [neogaf.net]

      While everyone else was losing money HARD (especially Microsoft), Nintendo was laughing all the way to the bank.

      $24,072,504,822

      Nintendo doesn't have to worry about the short term for quite a while.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        I wouldn't be so quick to write Nintendo off just yet.

        If we look at the 1998 .. 2010 year data from this console profit table [neogaf.net]

        While everyone else was losing money HARD (especially Microsoft), Nintendo was laughing all the way to the bank.

        $24,072,504,822

        Nintendo doesn't have to worry about the short term for quite a while.

        The thing is, even with the Game Cube being a bit of a flop compared to the PS2 and Xbox, Nintendo still made money. They made back all the R&D and some.

        So Nintendo doesn't need to worry about the lukewarm reception the Wii U got... But Sony and Microsoft need to worry about the lukewarm reception the PS4 and XBone got as they require years of good sales to get into the black, the fact they had to drop their prices so quickly after release means that the sales figures do not bode well for them.

        Mic

        • > Nintendo still made money. They made back all the R&D and some.

          Yup. I shipped 2 Wii games. The Wii was _literally_ a Gamecube twice as fast. They didn't even fix _any_ of the GPU bugs!

          Going forward I don't know understand what Nintendo is going to do, but bumping old hardware and focusing on making fun games seemed to worked extremely well for them in the past.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      the writing is on the wall for console monopolies when computers are becoming a commodity everyday device.

      Are computers an "everyday device" in the living room yet? And how well do games that aren't point-and-click work on mobile phones? If not, please help explain how "the writing is on the wall for console monopolies".

      Gamers want to buy games they care not what platform it is on but they are no longer going to buy 3 different consoles just to play a few games as adults

      But are they going to buy three gaming PCs so that everybody in the same household can play?

  • SEGA had the Sega Genesis, CD, 32X, Saturn and Dreamcast in the same period of time that Nintendo had the SNES and the N64.

    Fanboy all you like, people aren't made of money.

    • CD and 32x were addons, not separate systems in their own right.

      Honestly given that the Sega CD and 32X could be used in conjunction with each other, they should have released the Saturn as a standalone Sega 32X CD system.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Guspaz ( 556486 )

        The fact that they were addons actually made them even bigger disasters. Because they required custom software, they behaved like they were standalone systems (a Sega CD game was useless to a purely Sega Genesis owner). But at the same time, the maximum possible market for the SegaCD was existing Genesis owners.

        The Saturn was the biggest component of why the industry was pissed at Sega, but their scattershot console strategy leading up to the Saturn was definitely a factor on peoples minds.

  • Is Sega? Is Sega? Sega is just a software maker at this point. Did it fail is the question. Yes, it failed like Atari and countless other companies in other industries. These are two companies past their glory days in the same industry. The idea that they are the next Atari is frankly stupid. They are already out of the hardware biz. They WERE the Atari. Unless they dramatically have some kind of turn around their story is written and we know what it is. A more interesting question would be, "Is Sega t

    • so who is making those new genisis consoles with like 50 built in games??? They are pretty awesome for 30 bucks BTW
  • Also, past performance does not predict future results. If a company fails, it is reasonable to say that doing something differently might have helped the company not to fail. One cannot say that a specific action would have cause the company to succeed.

    Sony could have taken all the ideas and shut down the company like MS did with Nokia. They could have gathered enough intelligence during due diligence and then just paid to end the process before the sale.

  • When the market moved from fun games like Soul Caliber and Hydro Thunder to seeing how many ways it could clone wolfenstein, Sega didn't follow and thus disappeared. Sadly to this day all we have left are FPS's and their rehashed story lines.

  • It was never widely known that Sega of Japan was, for a time, negotiating to merge with/acquire The 3DO Company. Unfortunately, best available information suggests that Trip Hawkins, 3DO's chairman and CEO, wanted too much, and the deal fell through.

    As it happens, about three years ago I started doing an irregular series of Let's Play/Drown Out videos [youtube.com] on YouTube with my colleage, GammaDev. Both of us are former employees of 3DO, and we covered The Deal that Never Happened in a video about two years ago [youtu.be]

  • Even as a young teenager I could see Commodore was screwing itself. It seemed like every other issue of Amiga format bright with it a new Commodore CEO. It's a pity the Amiga died, it was pretty wonderful in its time.
  • Everyone looked forward to getting all of sega's great games on any system when they got out of the hardware business. But unfortunately they seemed to lose all their talent with the hardware and just resorted to knocking out Sonic games and the odd Crazy Taxi game. At his best Sonic was never that good. You can't maintain a company with Sonic games.

  • What kills all console games eventually is the difficulty of working with their development kits, and the paucity of documentation about how to wring maximum performance out of those development kits.

    Write a game using OpenGL or DirectX, and you have millions of potential buyers. Write a game using Android or iOS APIs, and you have millions of portable buyers.

    Consoles? Not so much. Your only market with those devices are dedicated gamers willing to spend money just to play games. It's a smaller mar

  • My dream for Dreamcast was that one of those JRPG makers would have made a solid MMO, and that there would have been dual: That Lameo Modem along side a LAN connection. Everyone knew online multiplayer was the future. If Dreamcast would have been the hardware for it, things could have been different. The only hard part is that broadband was just beginning to take off in rural areas over the next 5 years. So a lan connection might have been too ahead of its time... Not sure.

    If I was the head of Sega,
  • The fact that the least successful division at Sega(SoJ) in the end was making all the business decisions. (You know, stuff like when to launch the Saturn in the US. They couldn't have did a worse job on that.)
  • It's a great book that gives good insight into the era that gave rise to Sega. It really doesn't give much background into their downfall, but it does touch on the fact that SOA thought SOJ was releasing way too much hardware, and generally screwing everything up.

  • Sega failed for the same reason the Amiga died: they both failed to catch the 3d boat at home.

    Sega was the king of 3d in the arcades, with sprite-based and vector-based graphics.

    However, on the home front, they totally missed the boat. The first console that could play a decent version of Outrun was the Sega Saturn, whereas the PCs of the time and the PS were used and promoted for playing 3d games.

  • ATARI from the Jack Tramiel era, with the Jaguar console, showed that it wasn't enough to have the best hardware (it was the most powerful of its time).
    You also need the games.

    SEGA, with the DreamCast console, showed that it wasn't enough to have the best hardware (SONY was still at the PSX), it wasn't enough to have the best games (the lineup is legendary).
    You also need the marketing.

    SONY had the best marketing.

    Lying after lies, each one bigger (*) than the last, in order to torpedo the growth of the Dream

    • (*) : "The PS2 will connect to high-speed networks" PS2 had NO NETWORK DEVICE built-in. You had to wait like two years to buy the Hard disk/ethernet port combo.

      The network adapter doesn't include the HDD, that came out later.

      .Few games online.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org] More than the Dreamcast ever had and there's a few where the online functions are still operational. SOE only shut down EQOA in 2013!

      (*): "It will do Toy Story graphics in real-time!"

      Sony never actually said that themselves, it was Microsoft that made that claim in regards to the Xbox, not Sony with the PS2.

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