Thread 12069278

Or how 1 leak destroyed the entire SOA narrative

Fuck kalinske and Sega of america you killed Sega

>>12069278 (OP)
Bernie won. Sega lord x lost

>>12069287
>Let's save Sega SC-3000 home computer

>>12069278 (OP)
Sega of America is the only reason Sega lived at all. 10x more successful than SoJ and purposefully sabotaged due to honor autism

>>12069278 (OP)
SoJ fucked up the British launch of the SMS. Yes, they eventually managed to claw back marketshare, but, without the Christmas '87 fuckup, Britain would've firmly been Segaland, rather than continuing with 8-bit micros, and allowing NES a foothold. They also fucked up the Western version of the SMS, by not adding the YM2413.

SoJ fucked up the Mega Drive, by not making it forward-compatible, yet insisting to release an add-on which required direct integration with it. They also fucked up by not adding a second bank of 64 KB VRAM, insisting on SMS back-compatibility circuits in the VDP instead of extra colors/effects, and not using an integrated stereo DAC until the second model.

SoJ fucked up the Game Gear, by a) not making it directly compatible with SMS carts; b) insisting on a backlight, which at the time was a crappy power-hungry fluorescent tube.

SoJ fucked up the Sega CD by releasing it, despite the aforementioned lack of proper compatibility, requiring an expensive and substandard workaround. They also fucked up by using a shitty audio-player grade drive, with garbage random seek performance, and using an unreliable (and expensive) motorized tray mechanism in the original model, instead of a simpler and more robust (also cheaper) pop-top.

SoJ fucked up the Saturn by taking too long to design it, which caused its hardware to be obsolete by the time it launched. They also fucked up by attempting to brute-force performance via adding more of the same, leading to high unit costs.

>>12069314
>Sega of America is the only reason Sega lived at all

Nope

>A huge problem came to light at Sega of America. In the American market, it was typically large retailers such as Toys “R” Us and Wal-Mart that stocked game hardware and software. Those kinds of retailers would buy a huge quantity of stock at first. However, if they didn’t sell the stock within a certain period, they’d send it all back. We’d have to buy it all back.

>SOA’s posted profits in 1993, for example, were all washed away because it had to take extraordinary losses on returned stock later on. Those extraordinary losses came to $100 million or $200 million at a time. Furthermore, retailers in America held a lot of power, and they required manufacturers to have a certain amount of inventory on hand to replenish stocks when items sold out. For example, retailers required SOA to have at least 500,000 Genesis hardware units on hand to replenish sold stock, or they wouldn’t do business with us.

>SOA had an excess of inventory that would all be sold at once, bringing in a huge amount of revenue. Then, all that inventory would come back from retailers later on and SOA would take a huge loss. With the Genesis, all of those losses started to appear in 1994, 1995, and 1996. If you added up all the losses, the number would be astronomical.

>When we looked at the numbers carefully, even though SOA had a reputation for earning so much money, it turned out they weren’t earning much at all.

https://mdshock.com/2022/05/09/a-second-atari-shock-the-decline-of-the-16-bit-console-era/ an interessing article about the crack of 1993

SOA was stupid to want to continue the Genesis when people were tired of 16 bits games

They should have gone full on Saturn and released it in 1994 in the US a full year before the PlayStation

they guy is back shilling his blog

>>12069278 (OP)
The only reason why Americans support SoA so hard is because patriotism, on an objective level SoA fucked up pretty bad

>>12069278 (OP)
>1997

So where are the reports for years 1990 to 1996 when Sega was profitable and America was fueling them money? Oh you don't have it. Just a single year when everyone knew Sega was already in serious decline. And the report is for the year after CEO Tom Kalinske quit Sega of America.

This report is useless on its own without reports on the other years.

>report doesn't cover arcade cabinet sales.

Terrible oversight considering Sega of America also dealt with arcade machines, and arcade cabinet sales were the main source of revenue for Sega.

>>12069328
1. Source = your ass

2. All American retails forced companies to carry extra stock, and forced companies to take back items if they don't sell. This is standard operating procedure for retail in America. Nintendo, Atari, AND Sony had to do the same thing. Yet they never whined about it.

>>12069421
>In the fiscal period ending in March 1995, Konami took an extraordinary loss of ¥11.6 billion due to clearing out unsold inventory. During the same period, Capcom took a loss of ¥7.5 billion after writing down the value of its American subsidiary, and in the mid-year period ending in September 1995, Nintendo also took a loss of ¥9.8 billion after doing the same with its American subsidiary. This fiscal year, Sega is taking an extraordinary loss of ¥26 billion due to the downsizing of its American and European subsidiaries and due to the disposal of unsold inventory.

Sega loose much more money than it's competetitors

They overproduce much more than their competitor because Kalinske is a fraud who does not see how the market is evolving

People were tired of 16 bits games but Kalinske wanted to continue so he released the disastrous 32x instead of a worlwide Saturn release in 94

Killing Sega in the process

>>12069415
>So where are the reports for years 1990 to 1996 when Sega was profitable and America was fueling them money?

Read my posts moron


shoichiro irimajiri :

>>When we looked at the numbers carefully, even though SOA had a reputation for earning so much money, it turned out they weren’t earning much at all.

>>12069469
>SOA’s posted profits in 1993

>>12069278 (OP)
Saturn got Tomb Raider 1, but after it failed to get Tomb Raider 2 in 1997 after having done its part to build up the fan base, that fucked the company hard. Throw in Final Fantasy 7 also in the same year.

sega never shouldve entered the console business. they caugh lightning in a bottle with the genesis due to nintendo having no competition. this false success led them to destroy their company. if they wouldve just stuck to their fantastic arcade games, arcades never wouldve died in the first place. sega destroyed the arcade industry chasing consoles

>>12069502
Eh no the Saturn was already fucked since day 1 in the west

End of 1997 ,the Saturn was completely dead

>>12069458
Kek this is omitting all the sabotage from the japs involving the saturn in the western market. Japs killed sega by releasing the shiturn without a western focus and leaving the main market in the dark to try to pander to nips.

>>12069332
>SOA was stupid to want to continue the Genesis when people were tired of 16 bits games
It wasn't until 1996 that a 32/64-bit game broke into the top sellers.

The biggest mistake SOJ ever did was giving SOA too much liberty

SOJ should have been on total control and don't let these morons ruin everything

>>12069469
>shoichiro irimajiri

Oh so we're supposed to take the word of someone who:

1. He had nothing to do with SoA operations.

2. Has NO business experience in console and video games (his background was in cars and motorcycles).

3. He comes from Japanese hardcore corporate culture of refusing to take responsibility, and places blame on others.

4. Has a track record of failure. He was a failure in Sega of Japan's console division.

5. He pushed for the creation of Dreamcast and told Sega Executives that Dreamcast would bring Sega back to its former glory.

THIS is the guy you want us to believe?

Try again anon.

>>12069556
the honorable japanese do not lie. Samurai warrior code doesn not allow it

>>12069542
>this is omitting all the sabotage from the japs involving the saturn in the western market

Like what?

>Japs killed sega by releasing the shiturn without a western focus

Western focus game like the shitty games (Ghen war,Congo..)SOA help produce?


Yeah i think i prefer Sega rally or virtual fighter

>>12069569
>Sega rally or virtual fighter
arcade ports

>>12069458
>This fiscal year, Sega is taking an extraordinary loss of ¥26 billion due to the downsizing of its American and European subsidiaries and due to the disposal of unsold inventory.

What this report fails to tell you is that Sega Genesis earned Sega a total of around ¥1.05 Trillion yen (7 billion dollars) over its entire lifespan. So losing ¥26 billion yen ($173.33 million dollars) is not a big deal in the grand scheme. The Sega Genesis paid for itself hundreds of time over by 1997.

Not our fault Sega of Japan wasted all that profit on weird projects that never sold.

>>12069546
>It’s true that 16-bit consoles sold quite well and we were able to sell off a good portion of our inventory, but the games did not sell at all,” said Sega director Shunichi Nakamura. The best-selling game charts for the past few weeks in North America reveal that almost all of the top titles are for Sony’s PlayStation console. Games for Nintendo’s SNES console, which has sold over 30 million units—far more than the PlayStation—have disappeared from the best-selling charts.

16 bits games did not sell at all and that's where the money came from

People wanted something new , something that Sony will give them with more immersive experience like resident evil or tomb raider

Kalinske didn't see that and dismissed the Saturn in favor of a dying console

A worldwide release of the Saturn in 1994 with an emphasis on games like Myst would have changed everything for the better

>>12069585
>resident evil or tomb raider
Those are 1996 games, Sony shill-kun.

>>12069569
>Like what?
Like refusing to listen to America when designing the Sega Saturn. Sega Japan were told MULTIPLE times that Western developers and companies do not like double CPUS, and to not do it for the Saturn. SoJ totally disregarded America's requests of keeping the architecture simple and straightforward for developers.

Oh yeah there's also the issue of Sega Japan rejecting Sony's offer of partnership, Microsoft's offer to buy them, rejecting Silicon Graphics offer (who then left to work with Nintendo to make the N64), and also rejecting 3DFX (who went to go work with Midway instead).

>>12069583
I'm tired of having to repost the same quote every fucking time

shoichiro irimajiri :

>When we looked at the numbers carefully, even though SOA had a reputation for earning so much money, it turned out they weren’t earning much at all.

Read the interview ,the MD article about the crack of 1993 and the Pandamonium video about Sega FY 1997

>>12069594
>the crack of 1993
This meme will never take off.

Im not going to say who has the most blame, but SoA was clearly high off their farts and throwing whatever shit sticks believing they had Sony's bank account, like you see your competition putting titles like Crash and SM64 and your response is funding a FMV softcore porn game?

>>12069589
Designing a console take years anon

You can't completely change the architecture of a console late in the developpent without delaying the release of the console for at least 1-2 years

Giving Sony a 1-2 years lead market would have been suicidal for Sega

The proposal of Silicon graphics by Kalinske was another stupid idea

The N64 was notoriously difficult to develop for with huge hardware flaws and disappointing graphics

>>12069542
>Japs killed sega by releasing the shiturn without a western focus
But some of the PS1 biggest titles were JRPGs and japanese games like MGS and Gran Turismo

>>12069594
>Sega Japan: "Dude just try me bro. We looked at the numbers. It's all baka gaijin Americas fault! No we won't share the numbers. Just trust us!"

You mean the same numbers that we don't have access to? The same numbers that they won't publish?

You DO realize that Japan has a vested interest in trying to avoid looking bad right?


>Pandamonium video
Nice channel, but the guy has no freaking clue how retail works in the United States. It's pretty cringe. I also saw that he was getting roasted in the comments by several people who work retail. Then he deleted his original video, and reuploaded it. So all those comments are gone now.

>>12069604
Sega Japan was told very early on by Sega America what Western developers wanted in a console. Sega Japan ignored the requests, and just did their own thing with DUAL CPUs. Which was the worst possible choice Sega Japan could have made.

Even making the Sega Saturn based on the Model 1 arcade hardware would have been a better decision. At least developers would have more open to it.

>The N64 was notoriously difficult to develop
Develop? No. The main issue with N64 was the tiny storage space on the N64 cartridge...which annoyed a lot of developers and made them avoid N64.

>>12069606
Well we have the Sega FY documents where we can see the tons of unsold stock because Sega of america refused to move on from the Genesis

Thanks Kalinske for the 32x and the overproduction

>>12069617
>Sega Japan was told very early on by Sega America what Western developers wanted in a console. Sega Japan ignored the requests, and just did their own thing with DUAL CPUs

>Develop?

https://youtu.be/gRslfM-MOOw?si=V24Rgsg5BpgLUgXH

Sega of America never made money. It was all Sega of Japan

>>12069626
Are you new here? Have read ANY interview with Sega America staff, read Tom Kalinske's book, read Tom Kalinske interviews, or even read 3rd party books written by gaming historians who interviewed former Sega employees? Many have spoken about how their requests were largely ignored by Sega Japan including requests for the next Gen console after Sega Genesis. I strongly suggest you do some basic research before participating in this conversation. We can't have a debate if you aren't even aware of the facts.

>>12069619
Sega was dead by 1997. Every gaming kid in America knew that back then. 1997 was the year of Playstation especially Final Fantasy 7. That old Sega document is pointless.

But if you can find a Sega document from the 1994 or 1995 when Sega was still at their peak, then you might have a good argument.

>>12069717
>Sega Japan was told very early on by Sega America

When?

1994?
1993?

Too late

>>12069721

Read my messages and the fucking articles before posting please,i'm tired of having to repost

https://mdshock.com/2022/05/09/a-second-atari-shock-the-decline-of-the-16-bit-console-era/

I don't understand why Sega Of Japan fanboys just can't admit that Japan screwed up. Why is it so hard? Why? The story is simple. Sega of America told Sega of Japan what America wanted for their next console. Sega of Japan ignored all of it, and chose to do their own thing thinking they knew better. It was a bold gamble that ultimately failed.

We wouldnt be here debating this if Saturn was a huge success. You all would be praising Sega of Japan for courageous ideas and talking about how Saturn's design was so innovative, and how Nights into Dreams sold hundreds of millions of copies. Unfortunately the reality is that Sega of Japan's gamble failed. They ignored American needs thinking they knew better, and paid the price. That's it. No amount of debates can change that.

>>12069731
Nobody cares about your genuine fake news article. History will not be rewritten.

>>12069604
>Designing a console take years anon
And? Sega still had time to make changes.

>You can't completely change the architecture of a console late in the developpent without delaying the release of the console for at least 1-2 years
Isn't that exactly what Sega did when they freaked out about PS1 being 3D focused? Then shoved in extra CPUs into the Saturn.

>>12069604
You are exaggerating deeply. Development of Saturn began in 1992. Saturn was showcased in 1994. So that's 2 years.

>>12069745
Adding a second CPU is not the same as completely changing the hardware like Kalinske wanted

2 more years of Genesis when the 16 bits software market was dying since 1993 would have been a major mistake

A 2 years PS1 lead market would have been even worse

>>12069731
For the 7th time, post sources that weren't written by Japanese or show us interviews from non-Japanese people.

We all know Japan has honor culture and hates admitting they wete wrong. Especially corporate busienss culture in Japan. Those Japanese dudes have been known to commit suicide for being blamed for major business mistakes. That's why they never want to publicly admit fault. They would rather die than take the blame.

>>12069725
>When?
Mid 1992 according to Tom Kalinske. They didn't listen to his ideas, and he was ignored.

>>12069736
>History will not be rewritten

Your right

Those numbers will always show to ignorant like yourself the terrible situation of 16 bits market and the dumb decision of kalinske to continue clinging to the Genesis

>>12069765
Good he's a fucking retard who was half the reason for the 16 bit crash and completely squandered the genesis lead.

>>12069769
That terrible situation... the 3DOs and Jaguars were just flying off the shelves. Nobody ever heard of Donkey Kong Country or Sonic 3.

>>12069760
Dude the numbers are here,the fucking fiscal leak his here,the tons of unsold stock that Kalinske ordered are here

Kalinske fanboys are the most delusional people i have ever seen ,all the evidence point that this man is a fucking liar

>>12069771
>the 16 bit crash
It must suck being from the timeline where this happened.

>>12069772
>“The wave that brought us here was huge, but the tide has turned very quickly,” said Sega director Shunichi Nakamura in reference to the state of the 16-bit console market in Europe. At its peak in 1993, Sega’s revenue in Europe was about ¥60 billion, but now it has shrunk to one-third of that, around ¥20 billion.

>“It’s true that 16-bit consoles sold quite well and we were able to sell off a good portion of our inventory, but the games did not sell at all,” said Sega director Shunichi Nakamura. The best-selling game charts for the past few weeks in North America reveal that almost all of the top titles are for Sony’s PlayStation console. Games for Nintendo’s SNES console, which has sold over 30 million units—far more than the PlayStation—have disappeared from the best-selling charts.

>According to Sega’s Nakamura, “Through large-scale mass production, Sega has been able to reduce the manufacturing costs of its 16-bit console to the point where we aren’t losing money on production. However, we can’t earn a profit because the software—the most essential part—is just not selling.”

>As a result of downsizing its operations, Sega has reduced its personnel in Europe from 480 people in 1993 to just 120 people now, and in North America from 900 people in 1993 to just 350 people now.

Yep no problem here,the Genesis is thriving we should continue clinging to the Genesis instead of the Saturn

Genius Kalinske

>>12069786
Sega being woefully mismanaged does not mean there was a mythical "16-bit crash". One article written in 2022 versus the best selling games of that generation being released in 1994 and 1995. Hmmm, which makes more sense here?

>>12069790
>The numbers are false anon believe me!!!

Whoa Kalinske fanboys are one of a kind

+Mario world and Sonic 1 are the best selling games of that generation

Sonic 3 sold significatly less than it's 2 predecessor

>>12069797
You're the one arguing against numbers. Since in whatever timeline you're from the 32-bit consoles were a wild success in 1995. That's not how it happened in this version of reality however.

>>12069772
>he did the math
based

>>12069798
Yes it is

>The best-selling game charts for the past few weeks in North America reveal that almost all of the top titles are for Sony’s PlayStation console. Games for Nintendo’s SNES console, which has sold over 30 million units—far more than the PlayStation—have disappeared from the best-selling charts.

>>12069806
I too base my entire concept of reality on quotes mined in an article on some irrelevant website.

>>12069806
That article is from 1996, include the full text.

>On December 26 of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the previous generation of 16-bit consoles still commands the sales battle.” Nintendo and Sega’s 16-bit consoles were reported to have sold more than four times as much as Sony and Sega’s 32-bit consoles.

“It’s true that 16-bit consoles sold quite well and we were able to sell off a good portion of our inventory, but the games did not sell at all,” said Sega director Shunichi Nakamura. The best-selling game charts for the past few weeks in North America reveal that almost all of the top titles are for Sony’s PlayStation console. Games for Nintendo’s SNES console, which has sold over 30 million units—far more than the PlayStation—have disappeared from the best-selling charts.

>>12069287
Of course he won. People of his ilk wins when everybody else loses

Why are you arguing about whether Sega 16 bit could survive to 1996? That's EXACTLY what Nintendo did. They waited until 1996 to release Nintendo 64, and milked the SNES for 2 more years. So Yeah it is possible because Nintendo did it.

This proves Sega didn't have to release the Sega Saturn in 1994. They could have waited until 1996 and properly made corrections to the Saturn to make it appeal to western tastes, and listen to Tom Kalinske.

>>12069863
>That's EXACTLY what Nintendo did. They waited until 1996 to release Nintendo 64

Yeah and that delay was a huge mistake for Nintendo , they lost the market to Sony

Ah and Nintendo has the japanese market unlike the Sega Megadrive

The crack of 1993 was a western thing,in japan 16 bits games still sold relatively well unlike the west

>>12069875
Sony PS1 just had more games that people wanted to play. They won on sheer quantity. Too many game studios supported Sony.

>>12069882
Yeah because Sony was already well implanted and got tons of games before the N64 release

A N64 released at the same time as the PS1 would have changed everything

>>12069892
>A N64 released at the same time as the PS1 would have changed everything
it would've been as shit as the Saturn and still use carts because jewtendo are jews

>>12069892
>A N64 released at the same time as the PS1 would have changed everything
No it wouldn't, it'd still have lots of droughts in releases and studios would've still gone to Sony because they offered more lucrative and easier working terms

>>12069327
As an add-on (kek) to my previous post, SoJ fucked up majorly on their finances. They opened a shitton of amusement parks (full on entertainment centers, not just arcade venues), and forced the other branches (chiefly SoE) to do the same, even though the era of cheap real-estate credit had died alongside the Soviet Union.
SoJ were still operating like it was the bubble years.

>>12069813
post rael citations. not commie wikipedia.
and even if true, it means Ninteno won again.

The corporate structure of Sega was rotten from the ground up. The fact that SoA was able to send misleading numbers to SoJ that misrepresented their place in the market shows that the company was doomed to fail eventually. And the problems didn't stop at SoA, there was so much infighting, miscommunication and backstabbing at SoJ that they never stood a chance against Sony.

>>12069892
N64 games were more expensive to publish and produce. Nintendo price fixing cartridge manufacturing.

>>12069734
>Sega of America told Sega of Japan what America wanted for their next console.
And what makes you think they actually knew? The only thing they suggested was an early model of the N64's tech that wouldn't be ready until years later and that no one at Sega's console division was capable of developing for.

Lack of killer apps from both SoA and SoJ killed the console, and third parties would jump to Snoy regardless of what Sega could offer. That's all there is to it.

Didn't SoA tentatively reach out to Trip Hawkins for the 3DO tech in 1992?

>>12069875
>Yeah and that delay was a huge mistake for Nintendo , they lost the market to Sony
And Sega releasing Saturn in 1994 made a difference? Lmao.

I love how all these Sega threads basically boil down to

>"waaah. It's not Japan's fault! Stop bullying Sega Japan! People just don't understand how awesome the Saturn is!"


Every. Single. Time.

>>12069814
Why would the consoles be selling well but not games? Who was buying a console but nothing to play on it

>>12070648
Cheap rentals and second hand games.

>>12069421
> Source = your ass
The source is actual interviews from Sega of Japan executives at the time, as well as leaked financial documents.

>All American retails forced companies to carry extra stock, and forced companies to take back items if they don't sell. This is standard operating procedure for retail in America. Nintendo, Atari, AND Sony had to do the same thing. Yet they never whined about it
Then why wasn't Nintendo impacted by this? We never saw a massive dump of liquidated Gameboy and SNES consoles in 1997/1998 like we saw with Game Gear and Genesis consoles and games. What's far more likely is Kalinske made that deal with retailers to get Sega's consoles on store shelves, then never went back and renegotiated after they were selling. Nintendo and Sony probably had different arrangements that didn't have this devastating of an impact.

>>12069606
>You mean the same numbers that we don't have access to? The same numbers that they won't publish?
We do have the numbers, they're in the FY97 report. We also have access to Sega's Fiscal Year reports for each year and can see their overall revenue across their different departments.

>>12069589
>Like refusing to listen to America
They did listen to them. Their input was idiotic. Sega of America wanted at 68020 based console, that was a simple upgrade of the Genesis. That would have been horribly underpowered.

>Sega Japan were told MULTIPLE times that Western developers and companies do not like double CPUS
This would have been far too late in the design process. The 2nd SH-2 was the last minute change to the Saturn, it came about to boost the 3D Math capabilities. That change was made around Sepetember of 1993. By that point it would be far to late to completely redesign the system.

Secondly this is utter BS because when Sega of America designed the 32X in January of 1994, they COPIED the Dual SH-2 design from the Saturn because they LIKED that aspect of it's design.

>disregarded requests of keeping the architecture simple
Saturn isn't that complicated to develop for. The N64 is also stupidly complicated and that didn't stop people from supporting it. Hell Saturn's architecture didn't stop Japanese devs from supporting it. By comparison the PS2 makes both the Saturn and N64 look like stupidly simple consoles. Yet devs had not problem supporting the PS2.

> rejecting Sony's offer of partnership
This happened because Sony was acting in bad faith. Sega kept pushing for Sony to make a decision and they kept walking the line and refusing to commit to anything. So Sega walked away.

>rejecting Silicon Graphics offer
By the time this was proposed it was far too late in the design process. This came about around mid 1993. By this point Saturn's design was near final save for the 2nd SH-2. Secondly the chip shown to Sega and what went into the N64 are two different things. What went in the N64 was the result of working with Nintendo to make multiple changes to get it up to spec. That also resulted in the N64 being significantly delayed to releasing in mid to late 1996. That was far too late for Sega as they wanted to release at the end of 1994.

>>12069617
>Even making the Sega Saturn based on the Model 1 arcade hardware would have been a better decision.
The Model 1 is far worse to develop for. It's pretty much just throwing a bunch of DSPs at the wall in hopes that they'll be able to crank through all the 3D math. That would be far worse to develop for.

>>12070680
oh right i'm retarded

>>12070681
>Sega of Japan executives
Show us interviews from Sega of America, and Sega of Europe executives and I will believe you.

Sega of Japan failed to sell 3 consoles in their country. Their words are pointless.

I want to hear the words of the winners like Sega of America and Sega of Europe.

>>12070698
>The Model 1 is far worse to develop for.
Nope. Converting arcade hardware to consoles is standard for Sega. Sega Master system, Sega Mega Drive, and Sega Dreamcast all used downsized Sega arcade hardware to save costs.

Sega Saturn is the only anomaly. They should have used Model 1 arcade hardware. It was cheaper and would have saved development time.

>>12070774
>Sega of America
>bankrupts themselves overproducing games and hardware nobody wants
>winners

>>12070775
If I remember correctly, Sega's devs didn't want the Saturn to be based on the Model 1 because they were afraid that it would be too difficult to transition to developing 3D games.

>>12070806
So Sega of Japan were cowards and didn't want to jump to 3D? Even though the other branches were screaming for it. I have never seen such a dysfunctionally run global company like Sega of Japan. No wonder they could never make a comeback. They make the wrong decision at every opportunity.

>>12070857
Every branch of Sega was completely dysfunctional. Everybody was trying to tear each other down to make themselves look good. They lacked the consistent vision that let Sony and Nintendo be successful.

>>12070867
I don't even like Sega but I will give some of their branches credit. Sega of America and Sega of Europe sold 40 million Sega Genesis consoles. They made Nintendo sweat for a while.

>>12070916
Yes but everybody has to be on board across all branches to succeed long term. They needed to work out their differences if they wanted to win.

It's crazy that we needed a leak proving they were ordering millions of Genesis consoles and giving Genesis equal advertising budget to Saturn well into 1997 to realize these guys were retards.

The fact that they were working 16 hours a day on a PC game that no one asked them to make and the piece of shit still looked and played like Bubsy 3D should have been enough evidence. If that wasn't enough, STI's output when Yuji Naka wasn't inside the building should have also given it away. Real system movers like The Ooze, Sonic Spinball, and Comix Zone.

>>12070982
I unironically think you are being too hard on Bubsy 3D. That version of Sonic X-Treme might have actually been the worst game of all time if they had actually finished it.

>>12069327
>SoJ fucked up the Game Gear, by a) not making it directly compatible with SMS carts
This is insane reaching, SoA buttmonkey
SMS carts were too big for Game Gear

>>12069421
>All American retails forced companies to carry extra stock, and forced companies to take back items if they don't sell. This is standard operating procedure for retail in America.
How is this shit even legal?
Death to kikes

>>12069542
SoA was obsessed with shitty sports games when the overwhelming majority of gamers were nerds back then.
They didn't localize JRPGs which Saturn had plenty of, but they focused on shoveling on sports shit.
PlayStation came in and ate their lunch by giving weebs what they wanted.

>>12069556
>He pushed for the creation of Dreamcast and told Sega Executives that Dreamcast would bring Sega back to its former glory.
Which it almost did.
Too bad it couldn't undo all the damage.

>While president of Sega he invested $5 million into Nvidia, after the tiny Silicon Valley startup had failed to deliver on its contract to create the graphics chip for the Dreamcast.[6] Jensen Huang has publicly expressed his gratitude to Irimajiri for helping to keep Nvidia alive.[6] Nvidia went public in 1999, and in 2000, after Irimajiri had left, Sega sold its Nvidia stock for $15 million.[6] In 2017, Huang returned the favor by honoring a request from Irimajiri to speak to a small group of business leaders while visiting Japan.[6]

Yeah, I will trust the nip over some kike from Mattel

>>12069575
Arcade ports that everybody wanted to play at home, you fucking nigger

>>12069589
>Oh yeah there's also the issue of Sega Japan rejecting Sony's offer of partnership, Microsoft's offer to buy them
>Trying to gaslight with this bullshit when it's well known how Sony tried to fuck over Nintendo
Go fuck yourself seriously

>>12069606
>You DO realize that Japan has a vested interest in trying to avoid looking bad right?
And muttmericans don't? LMAO.
Just look at the vastly inferior boxarts in the US compared to Japan back then for example.
Or the laughable ''American canons'' of games like Sonic, and changed storylines of many games.

Muttmericans were a bunch of opportunistic parasites. Always trying to mooch off of Japan.

>>12069721
Using that logic, you could argue that Sega was already dead in 1994 when Donkey Kong Country came out

You can tell the guys in these threads who blame it all on SoJ and say the Saturn never had a chance have never played Saturn. There are hundreds of 3D games on the console that run at acceptable framerates, half of them by Western developers and 85% of them are third-party games. Dozens of western studios got 3D working on Saturn including the teams that worked on garbage licensed games like Independence Day. If X-Treme released it might have been the single worst 3D game to release on the hardware after 1995.

>>12071118
It really might have been.

>>12071174
They were basically dead as soon as DKC released. Genesis had an edge over SNES for a few years because the higher resolution and processing speed meant that Genesis could have better looking cartoon games, which Sega capitalized on with licensed movie games that played better on Genesis and Sonic. Nintendo finally realized their console's edge over Genesis was the higher number of simultaneous colors, so DKC was made to capitalize on this. DKC instantly sold millions of copies and everyone who thought Genesis could do better graphics than SNES immediately changed their minds. Genesis was doomed after that point, and SoA should have planned to support Saturn from 1995 onward. Genesis limped along in 1995 with sports games, but by 1996 everyone including sports gamers was on PS1 because SoA failed to market Saturn and failed to work with western devs to get Madden and other major franchises onto the console the first year. Sega was EA's preferred platform and the 32X ruined this relationship, EA's CEO was confirmed to have been mocking the 32X at E3 before it even released. EA even wanted to support Saturn into 1998 and 1999, but Sega killed it prematurely, which is why EA refused to make Dreamcast games.

>>12070916
>Sega of America and Sega of Europe sold 40 million Sega Genesis consoles
LMAO
They sold because of the Jap games to begin with

It only failed in Japan because of Nintendo Yakuza at the time illegally controlling the market, like they had done in the 80s even in the US

>>12071191
No, it failed because PC-Engine launched earlier, and manage to establish itself. It was basically an exact reverse of what later happened in the US. Also, unless I'm mistaken, the early Japanese Mega Drive library wasn't exactly stellar.

>>12071182
>Nintendo finally realized their console's edge over Genesis was the higher number of simultaneous colors, so DKC was made to capitalize on this.
Meh, I don't think it's because of the colors
SNES colors are overrated, especially considering most gamers were gonna use RF or Composite anyways

It was because it had pre-rendered CG graphics which at the time looked crazy
Sega tried to fight back by getting BlueSky Software to make Vectorman but Vectorman is just so generic and unappealing looking of a character compared to DK

>>12071204
>Thinking the PC Engine wasn't sabotaged by Nintendo too
Oh you sweet summer child

>>12071208
Vectorman is specifically bland and metallic looking because they couldn't display more colors on screen. DKC's pre-renders look better than any pre-renders on Genesis because the color gradients literally have more colors. It's also why the game has better theme and stage variety than Vectorman.

You can do a lot with clever use of a limited color palette, Sonic 3/Knux and Doom are probably the best examples, but the second you start trying to port pre-renders from machines that do 16-bit color? Forgetabout it. Genesis can literally only display 1536 unique colors. So how do you map 65,000 colors to 1536? The best you can do is approximate them with dithering and hope the CRT fixes it.

Of course, Sega had a console that could do 16 MILLION colors for sprites and backgrounds and 32,000 colors for textures and quads, but SoA refused to market it.

>>12071182
>EA even wanted to support Saturn into 1998 and 1999, but Sega killed it prematurely, which is why EA refused to make Dreamcast games.
EA had issues with Sega almost from the very day Saturn got released. It was a bitch to code, and EA demanded SoA send over programmers to help. Stolar refused (another consequence of him outright hating that console), and EA dropped Saturn like a hot potato. Then there was the Sega Sports thing, which EA considered as muscling in on their turf. And, finally, Sega dropped 3dfx as GPU provider (resulting in a highly contested lawsuit), which was the final straw.

>>12071239
???
Stolar wasn't COO until 1997 and wasn't President until 1998. He was just the hatchetman for Saturn. It was Kalinske who doomed it by sucking the Genesis' dick so hard that gamers thought the Saturn had erectile dysfunction.
And while I'm sure EA whined about the Saturn, it didn't stop them from releasing tons of games for it.

>>12071247
>Stolar wasn't COO until 1997 and wasn't President until 1998.
Oops, you're right, the Sega docs mention Kalinske asking the rest of SoA (in emails) why they aren't pushing Saturn harder, after his trip to Japan in early 1996 (so he was still CEO then).
>It was Kalinske who doomed it by sucking the Genesis' dick so hard that gamers thought the Saturn had erectile dysfunction.
He was right to hate it, though. It was a thoroughly shit design. And SoJ pushing for an early launch date fucked it even more.
>And while I'm sure EA whined about the Saturn, it didn't stop them from releasing tons of games for it.
They completely dropped it in 1997. They didn't release a single one of their sports games (or any games, for that matter) for it in 1998. Then came the Sega Sports issue, and dropping 3dfx (where EA owned 25% of shares).

>>12071127
>SMS carts were too big for Game Gear
Quite literally a skill issue. They should've rearranged the handheld internals to use them. The later Nomad used regular Genesis carts.

>>12071131
>How is this shit even legal?
>Death to kikes

The way it was explained to me was the "toilet paper" example. If there is a surge in demand in toilet paper and customers buy out all the toilet, then there needs to be extra stock for the company to send to stores on short notice. So there is as little disruption as possible. People don't have to wait for weeks while factories make new toilet paper. This idea of extra supply applies to all items.

Japan doesn't operate that way. From what I understand, Japan usually makes items in batches and usually only a certain amount. If items sell out, then there's no more. Customers have to wait a while for the company to make more and delivery to the store. There's no rule that forces Japanese companies to have surplus in stock. The rumor is that some Japanese companies like Nintendo take advantage of this by making only limited amounts of consoles, and creating an "artificial shortage" to create hype. Especially when a new console is just released. This makes customers extra determined to buy Nintendo items.

>>12071146
>Yeah, I will trust the nip over some kike from Mattel
You seriously think Nvidia is a good company? Especially with all the scummy things Nvidia has gone over the years. Nvidia should have rightfully gone bankrupt if CEO Jensen couldn't run his business well. It's not like it would matter. Another graphics card company would have taken their place. For example, if Nvidia went bankrupt, then today we would all be using 3DFX Voodoo cards instead.

>>12071274
>They completely dropped it in 1997.
Because Stolar infamously said, "Saturn is not our future." at E3 that year.

I'll never claim the Saturn design was perfect, but it was considerably better than the 3D-first machine with a 4kb texture cache (N64), an utter trashfire of a machine that only sold well in US/EU because of heavy marketing of its exclusives, something SoA abjectly failed at with Saturn, and which was even more ignored by third parties than the Saturn, having a much smaller library. Whoever you want to blame, releasing new hardware before 2000 was seen as a mistake by most gamers and many developers.

People refuse to blame Kalinske because he did so well in 1992 and 1993, but he was one of the key people that created the culture of dragging the Genesis far past it's lifespan.

>>12071283
Japan uses JIT, Just In Time, delivery and production. America would not switch to this production and stocking model until well into the 2000s. Most of the supermarket and big box chains that were alive in the 90s that are dead now are dead because they failed to transition.

>>12071239
>EA had issues with Sega almost from the very day Saturn got released.
No. It was even before Saturn was released. EA was one of the companies that told Tom Kalinske that they wanted simple architecture and nothing complicated. No crazy hardware, and lots of dev kit support to make it easy to create games. EA was shown early demo units of Saturn and they were very displeased.

>>12071287
>Nvidia should have rightfully gone bankrupt if CEO Jensen couldn't run his business well.
Those early years were rocky for pretty much every GPU manufacturer (except for ATI, for some reason, they survived the transition from 2D to 3D with little issues). Tseng Labs, Trident, S3, Rendition, Matrox, 3dfx themselves, the history of GPUs is littered with dead companies. Huang being a good or bad CEO was only a part of whether they survived or not. Luck was a big thing.

>>12071296
They still make tons of games for the Saturn

EA was probably the biggest western publisher that supported the Saturn

>>12071289
>Japan uses JIT, Just In Time, delivery and production. America would not switch to this production and stocking model until well into the 2000s. Most of the supermarket and big box chains that were alive in the 90s that are dead now are dead because they failed to transition.


This is not correct.

America has their own JIT delivery. They've been using this system since the 1980s.

Japan their own JIT delivery but the difference is that Japanese companies uses shady and underhanded tactics. The Executives would sign exclusive contracts called "keiretsu" between the company and the supplier. These are basically "alliance agreements". It's very bushido and typically Japanese. There's a lot of politics and shady stuff that goes behind the signing of a keiretsu.

A good example is Sega signing a keiretsu agreement with Hitachi to make chips Sega hardware. Even though Hitachi didn't make the best or cheapest chips (admitted by even Hitachi engineers themselves), they somehow secured the contract. There's a lot of speculation on how this was accomplished despite having a dozen other chip companies (Intel, IBM, Motorola, Fujitsu, etc) competing for Sega's contract. Like Hitachi's CEO having a prior relationship with Sega's CEO and backroom dealings.

America JIT is a little different. There is no loyalty. It's simply which supplier can offer the lowest bid. It's cold and pure business. Also America demands that "buffer stock" (extra stock) be made for items. Japan doesn't do buffer stock.

>>12071135
>SoA was obsessed with shitty sports games when the overwhelming majority of gamers were nerds back then.
Whether you like it not, Sports games are huge sellers. A consoles game sales are like 50% just from sports games.

>They didn't localize JRPGs which Saturn had plenty of, but they focused on shoveling on sports shit.
>PlayStation came in and ate their lunch by giving weebs what they wanted.
I will grant you that there were some JRPGs that deserved to be localized in America. However you do have to admit that Saturn had a ton of JRPG slop games. So much shovelware and you know it.

>>12071289
N64 having a ton of cost-cutting-induced design flaws, using an overpriced distribution medium with limited capacity, and being released one year later (meaning lost potential sales), does not make the Saturn look better. If anything, it makes it look worse.

>People refuse to blame Kalinske because he did so well in 1992 and 1993, but he was one of the key people that created the culture of dragging the Genesis far past it's lifespan.
His only fault was trying to piss against the wind circa late 1993, when SoJ adamantly told him the Saturn was going to be released in its current incarnation. Admittedly, it served as a massive amplifier to all the rest of the shit coming his way, but, as I mentioned previously, he wasn't wrong. Saturn was a fundamentally garbage design.

The biggest mistake he made was going for the 32X, instead of using the time to clean up SoA's operations. Ex. winding down SMS/GG support, shutting down the Sega Pico experiment before it would further impact financials (it hadn't yet been released in the West), clearing out the inventory of multiple Genesis versions and accessories, avoiding to launch the Nomad etc.
Despite his dismissive atttitude towards releasing CD versions of Genesis games, it was a more financially prudent option than trying to juggle all the plates in SoA's cupboard (and better than continuing FMV slop).
I think the correct way forward between late-'93 and mid-'95 (hopefully his efforts at cleaning up SoA would earn him a small respite, instead of the OG infamous May 1995 surprise launch) would have been to release a cheaper version of what we got as the CDX: no portable audio player functionality, no LCD, lower price than the Genesis 2/CD combo. Push for Sega Mouse and Sega CD memory cart support, and release (cheap) CD versions (fully-voiced "talkies") of various PC games (ex. The Incredible Machine, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Might & Magic: World of Xeen, Lands of Lore etc.).

>>12071381
I agree with your post mostly, but the Saturn is not fundamentally a garbage design. It's not as good as the PS1, but nothing is. In a perfect world, the SegaCD, Game Gear, Nomad, and 32X would have never released. The only one of those to have a game sell a million copies was the SegaCD with Sonic CD, which 70% of SegaCD owners worldwide bought. I own and have played large portions of the libraries of all of these consoles (barring the nomad, which has no unique games), and my honest opinion is that Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast are the only hardware they should have released after the Master System.

There are at least 400 good games on the Saturn, the N64 didn't even manage to release 400 games, and less than 100 of them are any good. The things the Saturn is good at, high resolution modes, sprite scaling, simultaneous on-screen sprites, extremely sharp hi-res textures on polygons are all things it does better than any of its competitors. Games like Last Bronx, Goiken Muyou 1, Virtual Fighter 2, and most of the good arcade ports do things that are fundamentally impossible on PS1 and N64. 3D Performance is acceptable. It takes some time to wrap your head around rendering polygons on VDP1 and effects, floors, and skyboxes on VDP2, but once you do performance is not notably worse than PS1, and N64's impressive rendering capability doesn't make up for it's terrible textures.

It's not so much that SoA was bad as it is that they were just one of many retard silos in Sega that were not coordinating properly with the rest of the company. It's not that they're villains that killed Saturn, it's just that they were misguided in their hatred of Saturn and should absolutely not be viewed as saviors of the company who were held back by Japan. And it's wrong that people smear Sonic Team, AM2, and AM3, as they were the only parts of the company doing anything right at the time.

>>12069510
>if they wouldve just stuck to their fantastic arcade games, arcades never wouldve died in the first place. sega destroyed the arcade industry chasing consoles
Spoken like a complete retard.
Arcades were never going to survive the 90s, no matter what. Home systems were rapidly closing the technology gap to arcades, and were offering games you were never going to see in cabinet form.
What astounds me is that Sega believed that porting arcade games to consoles could get them out of the hole they had dug themselves into.

Many of these retro stories always paint the Japanese company as utterly evil and stupid (Capcom wanting the SF movie game to be SF3, Mario 64 stealing the idea from Croc's devs for example) and with time many of them have been proven to be bullshit.
I think the same happened here to an extent. While S3ga of Japan is retarded, I don't think they were the only ones who crapped the bed specially with how awful most SoA games were for the Genesis.
The weird chase for FMV games and the 32x were dogsgit that only the most hardcore Sega fans would defend. I don't remember anyone who genuinely loved most of SoA output.
We also have stuff like the Saturn's launch in America and how some of its best titles were never released outside of Japan.

>>12071393
>I agree with your post mostly, but the Saturn is not fundamentally a garbage design.
Sorry, but it is. The issue isn't that it's worse than the PS1. Only the N64 is better at 3D than it, with gargantuan compromises in a lot of other areas. Saturn's main problem is that it's worse than the PS1 while being costlier/more complex to build.
Also, it basically mandates using a dithered output in order to get effects looking right. If you look at comparisons between Saturn games through RGB SCART versus composite, transparencies, lightmaps etc. are checkerboard meshes on SCART. The more accurate output ends up looking worse, which is a big flaw.

>It's not so much that SoA was bad as it is that they were just one of many retard silos in Sega that were not coordinating properly with the rest of the company.
Unfortunately true. Ironically, this proves that SoJ ultimately held the reins at pretty much every point, since heavily segregated siloing was the standard operating model for Japanese companies until very recently.

>>12071327
Yeah, none of those JRPGs would have sold like FFVII, but it would have been nice for hardcore nerds to have more games to play.

>>12071393
>In a perfect world, the SegaCD, Game Gear, Nomad, and 32X would have never released.
The biggest issue with the Sega CD and the Game Gear is that they are somewhat "canon events". So avoiding them would require massive changes in SoJ's corporate functionality, which would have made that company look nothing like the one we know.

Sega CD was a knee-jerk reaction to NEC's CD-ROM^2 popularity, which snowballed into an actual product, because of the typical Japanese refusal to go against the grain. Nobody had the courage to go "ayo hol up, we nearly a full console up in this bitch, we should just release a new standalone", when they decided on the second CPU (plus auxiliary sound/video chips) solution, after it turned out they couldn't just hitch a CD drive to the expansion slot.

Game Gear was a similar knee-jerk reaction to Game Boy's success. It should've also been iced (as long as they were unwilling to go the non-backlit route) when they couldn't get at least a hard minimum of 6 hours continuous game time off the six AAs it required (if I'm not mistaken, minimum continuous game time varied from game to game, but the lowest was under 4 hours).

I have a question that I don't think has ever been asked before.

If Sega Japan and Sega America disagreed on what type of console should be released after Sega Genesis, why not just...make two different consoles?

Hear me out. Sega Japan was already dead set on making Saturn for Japan with a focus on 2D games. Okay. Fine. The system appeals entirely to Japanese tastes. It was relatively successful in Japan too.

But since Sega Japan loves silo'ing all their businesses, why not just let Sega America do what they want for the Western market? Sega America originally had all these Western companies lined up to help partner with Sega America. So why not just...let Sega America do it?

Imagine a Western Saturn based around SGI graphics.

CPU: MIPS R4300i (or maybe Motorola or PowerPC). Single CPU only. No dual CPU.

GPU: Custom SGI graphics

Ram: 4mb Dram built in (but expandable with memory pack)

Media: CD-Rom (2x speed)

Partnered with Western companies in America to keep costs down and provide parts. Keep it basic wirh a single controller packed in, and launch it in America for $249.99

Surely this would have been a CHEAPER option than wasting money and time on the Sega CD, Sega 32x, Sega Nomad, Sega Game gear, and Sega CDX?

Do you think it would have worked for Sega? One console for Asian markets. One console for the West.

>>12071489
Oh yeah i would have love a SOA Saturn version with masterpiece only SOA can produce like Ghen war or congo...

>>12071497
You realize all the Western developers would make games for it right? SoA Saturn would dominate the West

SoJ Saturn would stay in Asia and make Asian games they love.

>>12071505
What would be the first party offering on the SOA Saturn?

Ghen war?
Congo?

Give me Night into dreams,Sega rally or Virtual fighter

>>12071517
Nights into dreams is shit and permanently damaged the console's reputation

>>12071517
Why does SoA need to make games themselves? Just do what Sony and Microsoft did. Have other studios make games for the system.

>>12071489
I'm a Sega extremist, so I would go even further. Waylay Hawkins circa early 1991, when he ran into some difficulties starting The 3DO Company, and either convince him that the VHS model doesn't work with game consoles, or just make him an offer he can't refuse. Work some cost-cutting on the initial blueprints: replace the ARM VY86C060-20FC-2 CPU with a Motorola 68030 (don't need the 68040's on-die FPU since the MADAM GPU already has a custom one, and the original ARM CPU didn't have one either), rejigger the system logic to account for the different architecture, dump Video CD compatibility (the MPEG-2 add-on module and corresponding expansion slot/board circuitry), ditch the piddly internal save memory in favor of a dedicated save cartridge, add a savegame manager to the OS (instead of leaving it to the mercy of game devs), put two controller ports on the console and shitcan the cumbersome daisy-chain idea, keep the shoulder buttons but use the 6 face buttons from the Mega Drive second gen gamepad (resulting in basically the OG Saturn controller, but that's the idea), and launch the whole thing either late 1992 or early 1993 (Hawkins wasted a lot of time trying to get everything in sync between hardware makers and game devs, and ultimately failed to do so, because the entire concept was fundamentally flawed).

>>12069328
>>SOA’s posted profits in 1993, for example, were all washed away because it had to take extraordinary losses on returned stock later on.

The returned stock happened because the 32x and Saturn made the company lose all goodwill with everybody in the universe except the most hardcore lunatics who still bitch about what could have saved the Saturn. Every retailer in 1995 had enough of Sega because they fucked around with their store setups (these are things set up half a year in advance, you can't just change it on a whim like Sega did), every parent was pissed off at Sega because they kept introducing new hardware and new gimmick continuously and then dropping them at record time (after the 32x and Activator, nobody would have been surprised if the Saturn lasted six months before never being spoken of again), and every developer was pissed at Sega because the Saturn devkits either did not exist or did not work (there are interviews with the devs of Sim City and Virtua Racing - they were allowed to code on Saturn devkits for like half a day every week, by visiting Sega offices) and oh the console also couldn't do proper 3D.

None of the narrative changed. SOA made the company popular overnight. Sonic would've been some Gex tier garbage on a console as popular as the 3DO, if not for SOA. It's Japan forcing the Saturn and okaying the 32x that led to the company tanking.

>>12070694
>They did listen to them. Their input was idiotic. Sega of America wanted at 68020 based console, that was a simple upgrade of the Genesis. That would have been horribly underpowered.

Wasn't that in 1993 when they had to make a Atari Jaguar beater? It wasn't a bad proposition, as long as you have a fast enough T&L unit.

>>12071424
>Also, it basically mandates using a dithered output in order to get effects looking right. If you look at comparisons between Saturn games through RGB SCART versus composite, transparencies, lightmaps etc. are checkerboard meshes on SCART. The more accurate output ends up looking worse, which is a big flaw.
Composite video is also essential for PS1/N64. The low-res textures and dithering definitely benefit from composite video; the fog in Silent Hill being a famous example.

Also SCART was basically exclusive to Europe, so it's unlikely that artists working on games in Japan or America intended for them to be displayed this way.

>>12071519
>damaged the console's reputation
I never looked at it that way but you're probably right. It was the first game I got with my saturn and after that I never bothered trying another game. Even the "killer app" was still arcade-style timed score attack slop and it wasn't even an arcade port.

>>12071489
I don't think this would have prevented third-parties from jumping over the PS1 through deals with Snoy and their ease of/cheaper development/manufacturing and promotion. You also kill western games from being released in Japan and viceversa by essentially having two different consoles to develop for and with entirely different hardware specs. Many of the best selling games in the 5th gen came from Japan.

>>12072082
Technically, SCART was also available in Japan (had different pinouts, but was otherwise identical to EuroSCART), though nowhere near as widespread. There's a guy doing composite vs RGB comparisons, and he uses the Japanese SCART cable. It looks pretty bad: the colors are clean, but all transparencies and shadows are fucked:
https://youtu.be/hzTemoPUhZc

>>12072026
Even if Sega played every hand perfectly, Sony still would have wiped the floor with them. Everything they could do, Sony could do better. Yeah they fucked up, but it was always going to end poorly.

>>12069278 (OP)
A house divided cannot stand. Sega failed to heed Abe Lincoln's warning.

>>12071505
>SoA Saturn would dominate the West
How

>>12069278 (OP)
why is this edited like a ddees image

>>12072261
you think Sony Japan and Sony America had the same policy at that time?

The big Sony game of 1995 in japan was arc the lad ,a 2D RPG

Did Sony america publish that game ?
No

And it's the same with Nintendo or any other company,they don't have same vision that's normal stuff

The big problem is that SOJ gave too much leeway to those SOA morons.
They should have been much more harsher and stricter

>>12072302
No idea it's the thumbnail from Pandamonium video not my edit

>>12072307
Arc the Lad was never going to be big in the west. I don't think that was a case of infighting or sabotage, like with Sega.

>>12071489
>why not just...make two different consoles?
Economies of scale.
It's far more cost effective to mass produce a single product on a large scale.
>>12071505
Except that 3rd party devs had already abandoned Sega and Nintendo in droves to make games for the PlayStation.
Sega copers keep forgetting just how many bridges Sega burned in the 90s.

>>12071505
Western devs in the mid 90's were mostly working on pc. They were two completely different markets back then.

>>12072316
There is no infighting between SOA and SOJ

Another lie Kalinske

>I swear, japanese were jealous of my genius and try to destroy SOA even if that doesn't make sense from a business perspective...believe me!!!

>>12072319
>Economies of scale.
>It's far more cost effective to mass produce a single product on a large scale.
But this only works if you spread out production to multiple factories to meet demand. Sega Japan was notorious for not doing this. They kept production to a single factory in Japan.

>>12072493
Anon, I like Sega a lot, but even I have to admit that the Sega Japan no idea what they are doing when it comes to marketing...especially to Westerners. They don't understand Western taste.

If they did, then the Sega Genesis would have been a success in the 2 years (launched in 1988) before Tom Kalinske was hired to take over. And the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast would have been a success after Tom Kalinske left.

And this isn't even counting how Sega Saturn failed in Europe too.

>>12072676
Saturn is a failure, it can't live with PlayStation around because very bad with 3d, you can't live without 3d. And Dreamcast has super shit construction. Super shit battery and PSU, super shit vmu, super shit controllers with only one stick, no triggers, only four buttons, shit shape hands hurt, shit cable sticking backwards. Stupid shit Windows and cancer online mmo shit.

>>12072676
Yeah, Sega was ignorant. Thinking they needed a direct counter to the Jaguar, thinking that straight arcade ports were good enough, making the Saturn a nightmare to develop for, trusting STI with a full fledged Sonic game.
But none of it was malicious. SoA CEOs keep claiming that SoJ was out to get them, that they were willing to sink the entire company just to spite those pig Americans. In truth, it was a company that was out of touch with the mass market, on both the Japan and American side.
Of course, everyone is getting their information from American CEOs biographies. They're not going to put themselves down in their narcistic retelling, all of their failures is everyone else's fault, they couldn't possibly be the failure.

>>12071279
>The later Nomad used regular Genesis carts
And look how well that did.

>>12072815
SEGA is arcade company, not consumer one. Arcades are a business company property, player is just a slave to get money from, they don't care about slaves. But in the consumer market this useless slave is a direct business partner in place of a company, so they failed naturally being imprinted with arcade mentality. And even in the arcade business SEGA is notorious cancer evil practitioners worse than others like Konami.

>>12072323
Exactly. PS1 didn't have any western games, it would have been even worse for Saturn.

>>12072815
>>12072676
>>12072812
I just want to understand why Sega Japan leadership failed when Nintendo and Sony succeeded? Like what is mentally going through Sega Japan Executives heads as they made their decisions? Because looking back as a fan of Sega, all their decisions are just baffling to me.

Was it really that hard to make an affordable, easy to program, game console? Sega literally had mascots just like Nintendo too. With Sonic, Tails Knuckles, Streets of Rage characters, etc.

Help me understand how Sega Japan ended up like this? What was going through Japanese leaders heads?

>>12072815
SoJ was malicious, but it was the kind of petty retarded maliciousness which was pretty commonplace among Japanese companies from the period.
Anybody claiming otherwise just needs to look at the Sega Virtua Processor debacle.

>>12072260
>Even if Sega played every hand perfectly, Sony still would have wiped the floor with them. Everything they could do, Sony could do better. Yeah they fucked up, but it was always going to end poorly.
Consumer product sales aren't warfare, not winning doesn't mean losing. You get can get silver and bronze too, lik in the Olympics. They could've been second place (even at a distance), and still be profitable, if they hadn't beaten each other up.

>>12073185
That's not malicious, they were heavy handed in managing other countries. Nintendo was just as heavy handed, NoA couldn't jump unless Yamauchi said so. But because they made the better business decisions nobody talks about them.

Hell, the Japs were just fine with Kalinske running the show from 90-93, the most successful time for the American division. Once SoA started posting losses in 94, the executives thought they needed to be more involved to keep the momentum that the American division had, but ultimately their meddling made it worse.

Once more, it's executives being ignorant. Not malicious. The whole "Sega of Japan sunk the whole company because they couldn't stand Americans being successful!!!!" is the stupidest theory.

>>12073241
>But because they made the better business decisions nobody talks about them.
Sort of. Nintendo's biggest and most enduring win was forcing Western execs to march in lockstep when it came to handhelds. For whatever retarded reason, Western execs, on average, tended to despise handhelds, so every handheld not made by Nintendo (and not called PSP) underperformed.
They did have their duds. I can't imagine what Howard Lincoln felt when presented with the Virtual Boy shit sandwich, or what Reggie Fils-Aime felt when presented with the equally large shit sandwich that was Wii U. Admittedly, they certainly were better at softening blows to their bottom line.

>Once more, it's executives being ignorant. Not malicious.
But it is. SoJ execs were relentlessly bullied by Nakayama (remember that high-school-tier bullying was extremely commonplace in Japanese companies at the time) for their low performance between 1991 and 1993 (see picrel for how dire it was in Japan compared to ROW), and, once Western sales started faltering, they went "aha, now's the time to show baka gaijin buta who's really the boss here". Japanese businesspeople were routinely very petty in the 80s and 90s, and ultimately needed a two-decade-long recession to beat that out of them.

That's not to say SoA made no bad calls. Concentrating on FMVs for the Sega CD was the big one (on a fundamental level, FMVs were [intended to be] the Western equivalent of [or response to] anime cutscenes but, with a handful exceptions, they failed in implementation), supporting too many platforms was another (Sega Pico was pointless in the West, because learning an alphabet language is ultimately far easier than learning one based on 3 different pictogram types, and SMS/GG should've been wound down circa late 1993), shovelware-ing the Genesis catalog to inflate it was yet another, and going for the 32X and Nomad were more bad calls.

>the Saturn was too hard to develope for!! Bad SOJ they should have listen to Kalinske

I need to reminder you that the N64 is even harder to program for?

>N64.com: Is the N64 an easy platform to develop on?

>Maegawa: It is pretty difficult. Compared to the Saturn I think it's more difficult.

And Kalinske wanted to work with the guys that made this hardware !!!

>>12073361
Yeah, but Nintendo provided excellent support to developers from the start. So it evened out.

Unlike Sega that didn't even provide proper Saturn dev kits at the beginning, and their documentation was very lacking. Sometimes not even properly translated for Western developers. Sega just basically told developers to figure it out and deal with it.

>>12073580
>but Nintendo provided excellent support

Lmao they didn't even share their microcode to help third party

>collaborate with sony instead of making the saturn
>call it the Sega-Sony playstation (they would have fought over the order of the company names if this happened)
>basically just the ps1 but with sega games too
>profit and make nintendo seethe even more

>>12073992
>Sony eventually splits off and makes their own console, because that was always the plan even from the Nintendo Sony CD. Sega still dies.
Why does everybody pretend Sony was some poor mistreated company? They were just as cut throat as Nintendo.

>>12069278 (OP)
what about Sega of Europe? were they even a thing?

>>12074062
They were on their smoke break.

>>12073602
>Lmao they didn't even share their microcode to help third party
This. Rare even reverse-engineered the N64 microcode on their own for Conker's Bad Fur Day. This was a big no-no, but they got away because of their solid reputation with Nintendo.

>>12074062
Good question. But here in Europa, Sega has too many fights in 1994-1996:

sega pc
sega arcades
sega megacd
sega 32x
sega master system
sega game gear
sega megadrive

Also they were more focused on getting games translanted to 5-6 main european languages

Sega of Japan was always led by old men who still lives in the 80's, sonic as the failure of Sakura Wars reboot was SoJ
All of the early 90's fuckups for sega in the US and americas were SoA's fault in part due to sheer incompetence from kalinsky and his team against Nintendo and their marketing and lawyer department
Also, EA began focusing more on PC courtesy of Origin and their newly acquired Bullfrog.
And they began doing more profits there than on Consoles, Mainly Thanks to Ultima, CnC, Dungeon Keeper and Wing Commander 3 and IV.

>>12074672
>sheer incompetence from kalinsky and his team against Nintendo and their marketing and lawyer department
I wouldn't go as far as call it "sheer incompetence". After all, Howard Lincoln had worked as an attorney prior to joining Nintendo, so anybody going against them would have been at a disadvantage.
Sega did better against Nintendo than Atari, who stupidly lost one of the biggest game franchises in the world, because Tramiel was a cheapskate who hired some 2nd rate lawyer firm (the Tetris case would've been winnable, had he hired a legal firm specializing in intellectual property).

>>12069278 (OP)
>1997
Sega was already dead by then. Everyone knew that.

>Not showing arcade sales
North America was the biggest buyer of Sega Arcade cabinets. Yet this report doesn't show it. Why?

>>12075893
>Yet this report doesn't show it. Why?
Arcade and home console divisions were separate entities, each with their own individual finances.

>>12075964
They were still both handled by Sega America. Sounds awfully convenient for you to remove North America arcade cabinet sales. Because if you included it, then America would utterly crush Japan in sales revenue. Let's be honest here.

>>12075967
>They were still both handled by Sega America.
True, however the financials were separate. There wasn't an all-encompassing "Entertainment" division, it was all individual little silos which didn't really interact with each other. Hence the disfunctionality.

>>12073072
SEGA is the same as any other company, only worse so they hit the bottom sooner. Sony degenerated after two consoles (PS1 and PS2), but SEGA right after the first one Mega Drive. They all do good at the beginning to gain the market share, but degrade after gaining success, this is standard corporate practice.

>>12076003
>SEGA right after the first one Mega Drive
It was their third console. Their third console to compete with the Famicom, in fact.

>>12072026
>Genesis Activator
Eh, it was similar to other crappy gimmicky peripherals of the period, like the NES U-Force and Power Glove.
I think a bigger dud was the Sega VR, which ate up a lot of R&D funds, only to be cancelled right before release, due to health & safety issues.

>>12076019
Technically it's the 5th

SG 1000
Sega mark 2
Sega mark 3
Master System
Megadrive

>>12076041
The is the same problem except in the opposite direction. Too many consoles. Sega Japan were so bipolar that they couldn't sit still and support a console for 5 to 7 years like a normal gaming company. They kept making new consoles every 2 to 3 years. No wonder Sega had a bad reputation among retailers for abandoning their products so quickly. Yes, that incluses Sega Japan top. They abandoned their Sega Pinball division despite amazing sales and Japanese arcades loving them. How stupid.

>>12076003
It's an Asian comoany thing I've noticed repeatedly.

Instead of thinking:
>Okay we've attracted Westerners to buy our electronics, and we're major global success. Let's make sure we listen to their needs. We don't want to lose their loyalty!

They think:
>Good. We finally tricked the foreigner gaijin into buying our electronics. We finally have the money to do what we *really* want. Let's take all the profits, and make stuff that no one outside Japan wants to buy.


I don't know why but so many Asian companies suffer from this mentality. Sega was especially bad.

>>12076078
>Sega Japan were so bipolar that they couldn't sit still and support a console for 5 to 7 years

The Megadrive has a life cycle of 6 years anon...

>>12076134
That was the exception. SG-1000 was replaced in two years, and Mark III/Master System in three. The fact the Saturn had the second longest lifespan of a Sega console is telling.

>>12076138
Sega still supported the Master System long after the release of the Megadrive

>>12076142
Only for the handful of Euros that were still using their’s. The majority of Sega’s resources went straight to the next console once a new one was released.

>>12076134
>The Megadrive has a life cycle of 6 years anon...
Not in America and Europe which was Sega's biggest customers. Oh and Brazil too.

Don't give me that nonsense about Japan life cycle. Mega drive sold like shit in Japan. No one cares.

>>12076164
>Not in America and Europe which was Sega's biggest customers

???

Genesis released in 89 in North America

The Saturn in 95

that's 6 years anon

>>12076176
Ah, but Vectorman 2 came out in 1996! And NBA Live’98 the year after! So it was still being supported for like 10 years, is what I’m sure is that anon will say.

>>12076176
>that's 6 years anon
I'm glad you can count. But that has nothing to do with Sega support. Try to keep up.

The final years of the Mega Drive was a total drought. Especially in Europe.

Just like what Sega did with the Game Gear. Abandoned it in the final years.

>>12076176
Based retard

>>12076176
Genesis was a joke during the last 2 years of its life. Barely any good releases and just slop.

>>12076302
>Genesis was a joke during the last 2 years of its life. Barely any good releases and just slop.
That's in no small part due to the lack of a life extender. PC-Engine had the CD-ROM^2, SNES had the Super FX chip.
Whereas all attempts at extending Mega Drive's lifespan were busts:
- Sega CD was a dud in Japan because of the small user base, and was a dud in the West because of FMV games turning out to be junk. And the design itself should've never been accepted for production in the first place.
- The Lock-On passthrough was quietly dropped due to Naka's freakout over his experience in the US.
- No standardized multitap was adopted (despite several individual game-exclusive models existing), because of a severe case of the retards.
- The SVP turned out to be overheating garbage, and no further attempts were made at another chip due to the risk of uncovering the SHAMFUR DISPRAY from the Samsung affair.
- 32X's failure is notorious.

>>12076302
The Genesis only saw 7 releases in the last two years of its life and 5 of them are sports titles and one of them is probably the worst version of Frogger ever made.
>NHL 98
>NFL '98
>Madden NFL 98
>World Series Baseball '98
>The Lost World: Jurassic Park
>NBA Live 98
>Frogger

>>12076359
>Sega CD was a dud
The Sega CD was actually a modest success for Sega and wound up turning a profit until it's discontinuation.
>The Lock-On passthrough was quietly dropped
Lock-On Technology was only ever intended to be used for Sonic & Knuckles with zero plans for it to be implemented in any other game.
>No standardized multitap was adopted
Sega literally had their own multitap, the Team Player, pic related.
>The SVP turned out to be overheating garbage
The SVP worked fine in Virtua Racing and was planned to be used with several more games, but they figured it wouldn't be cost effective with the aging Genesis platform.
>32X's failure
This and the Saturn's botched US launch are the two things that really ended up fucking Sega over.

>>12076614
>The Sega CD was actually a modest success for Sega
2.24 million sales is less than 10% rate (for 28.54 million Genesis units), so not really. It wasn't a giganigga flop like the 32X, but not a genuine success either. CD-ROM^2 had something like a 40-something% rate (admittedly, for lower total PCE units).
>Lock-On Technology was only ever intended to be used for Sonic & Knuckles with zero plans for it to be implemented in any other game.
Which was a violently retarded idea, since the base concept was extremely solid. I strongly suspect Naka poisoned the well with his spergouts whenever STI was mentioned, so the higher-ups dropped the issue.
>the Team Player
Which was standardized in name only; EA had its own version, and Codemasters produced their own multitap cartridges. A simple solution would've been a Lock-On style multitap offering 2 extra ports (somewhat resembling the Codemasters J-Cart).
>The SVP worked fine in Virtua Racing
It didn't. Retailers were told to limit the amount of runtime for Virtua Racing display units, else they'd overheat and blow their carts. Samsung botched the processor, which was only discovered after Sega people went to Hitachi to delid the chips and see what the fuck was causing them to constantly overheat. And this was because Sega execs were retarded enough to sign a contract for 100k (or thereabouts) chips without getting engineering samples first. The contract was signed the day after a big brothel orgy and pub crawl (organized by Samsung), so Sega execs were tired and hungover as fuck, and didn't read the terms carefully. Hence why they resisted attempts at a redo, because the details of their fuckup might transpire and they'd lose face (also possibly their jobs for being retards).

>>12076651
Splitting Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles into two separate games utilizing Lock-On Technology was done at the behest of Naka, who desperately wanted the game to ship in time for the McDonald's happy meal promotion for the game.
>Retailers were told to limit the amount of runtime for Virtua Racing display units, else they'd overheat and blow their carts
Gonna need to see a source for this one.

The Saturn failed because it didn't have enough support from British developers (biggest truth nuke of all-time).

>>12076673
Psygnosis were making Saturn games pretty early on

>>12069813

1995:
Virtua Fighter 2 must have sold a lot of units in Japan. Virtua Fighter 2 really was Sega's best selling game in Japan at that point.But the series was in battle with Tekken. DKC2 and DKC3 were big sellers. Chrono Trigger is a much bigger hit than I realized, must have been a lot of Japanese sales. You can really see the Playstation 1 storm the 1995 top 10 sales charts.

>>12076654
>was done at the behest of Naka, who desperately wanted the game to ship in time for the McDonald's happy meal promotion for the game.
It wasn't Naka. It was SoA who needed the software ready in time, both for the McDonald's promotion (Sonic 3, February 1994), and a big launch on MTV, broadcast from Alcatraz Island (Sonic & Knuckles, October 1994).
>Gonna need to see a source for this one.
It came to me in a dream. There was yet another thread about Sega, roughly 3 or so years ago, and one anon posted a fair amount of stuff about the SVP, including that Samsung hamfistedly die-shrank the process in order to fit the chip dimensions demanded by Sega, but the design didn't scale properly, leading to said heat issues.
I've found a different article about how apparently the SVP leaked RF interference like crazy, and it could inadvertently phreak some early cordless phones, causing them to ghost ring.

>>12076676
>>>12076673
>Psygnosis were making Saturn games pretty early on

Psygnosis was also really active on the Sega Mega Drive/ CD hardware, they probably also supported Sega's console early on. Psygnosis really put the majority of their resources behind the Playstation. They designed the PsyQ dev kit. When they did publish games on the Saturn, they were usually a year behind. Wipeout for the Saturn released months before Wipeout XL on the PS1. Demolition Derby 2 released not long after the Saturn Demolition Derby port.

>>12076614
>The Sega CD was actually a modest success for Sega and wound up turning a profit until it's discontinuation.
Sega Japan didn't support it enough.

Is it true Saturn never got it's 2D Sonic title because they told the old jap STI team to promote the 32X?
If so, it feels like a Star Fox Zero situation where Miyamoto was tasked to justify to GamePad and get Platinum grunt most of the development instead of saving all of the effort for a new game on the Switch.

>>12077136
No. The reason a sonic game never happened on Saturn was for several reasons.

1. Sega Japan was too busy promoting "new" franchises that they thought fought the future of Sega. Like their Virtua series Such as Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Virtua Cop, etc.

2. Behind the scenes political fighting between the different branches of Sega. Sonic was mostly made by the Japanese teams, and they felt they had ownership of it.
But Sonic sold like shit in Japan. America and Europe were the ones who bought hundreds of millions of Sonic games. So the West felt like they were at least (partially) entitled in having a day in what the next Sonic game should be since the West were the ones paying for it.

The Japanese Sonkc team felt otherwise. They used their political leverage with the Sega Japan bosses to keep Sonic for themselves and prevent other teams from attempting to make a Sonic game

3. Clashing views on what the next Sonic game should be like.

4. Sonic's Japanese team deciding to not make Sonic and decided to make Nights into Dreams instead. This isn't necessarily bad, but the team was called "Sonic Team" and Saturn desperately needed a sequel Sonic game.

5. Without a launch Sonic title or a 3D Sonic game later in life, the Saturn sold like sh1t in Western countries. It also ruined marketing because they couldn't use Sonic to market the Saturn because...well...there was no Sonic game on Saturn.


6. Sonic was not popular in Japan compare to the West. In Japan, Sonic was just considered "one of many" Sega characters. In the West, Sonic was considered the mascot and leader of Sega.

7. Sega Japan's narrow minded vision and decision made them focus only Japanese interests, and not the interests of the global audience. Thus they made Sonic as low priority.

8. Very Low Saturn sales immediately suspended a lot of projects.

>>12077397
>1. Sega Japan was too busy promoting "new" franchises that they thought fought the future of Sega. Like their Virtua series Such as Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Virtua Cop, etc.
Ironically, one of the main criticisms levied at Saturn was the lack of titles from Sega's established series. No new Sonic, no new Golden Axe, no new Phantasy Star etc.
>So the West felt like they were at least (partially) entitled in having a day in what the next Sonic game should be since the West were the ones paying for it.
This is one I give to the Japanese. While Sonic did sell massively in the West, and was considered Sega's main mascot (similar to Mario for Nintendo), it was the Japanese vision of Sonic which sold so well, so they should've been let to continue it. Though SoA should've applied more pressure on SoJ to get some form of Sonic title ready for 1995.
>7. Sega Japan's narrow minded vision and decision made them focus only Japanese interests, and not the interests of the global audience. Thus they made Sonic as low priority.
SoJ's parochialism caused issues at several points in their history as hardware manufacturer, starting all the way back with the SMS. The Western version lacked the YM2413, and they fucked up the British launch due to having no urgency regarding needing the shipments in stores no later than December 23. This was because Christmas in Japan was just an occasion for couples to go out, have a meal, then rent a love hotel room and fuck. It wasn't a family holiday with gifts (that was New Year).

>>12077846
It's ironic. Sega was never defeated by outside forces. Sega were defeated from within with their bad decision making, and their competitors took advantage of these mistakes. If Sega made every correct decision (make Saturn cheaper and easy to develop for, seriously listened to Western needs, and pushed Sonic and other franchise games hard, etc), then Sega would have have put up a much better fight. They may not have been able to defeat the Juggernaut of Sony Playstation, but at least Sega would have survived to today. Imagine if Saturn and Dreamcast were both moderate successes (like the Sega Genesis) with a rich library of games and many mascots. There would probably be no Xbox today. Sega would be part of the big 3 console systems. What a pity that Sega of Japan are run by a bunch of narrow minded weirdos. It's like watching your child never achieve their full potential because of poor mistakes they keep making.

>>12077976
>but at least Sega would have survived to today.
Dying in the soulful retro era when the industry was something to be proud of is a much better end then turning into the soulless husk that are Sony and Nintendo today. Sony is unrecognizable and Nintendo just released a console that is an exact clone of the previous one as they continue to milk brain dead nostalgia addicted tendies. DEAD in all ways but profit for execs and shareholders.

>>12069278 (OP)
I think it's clear both sides made huge mistakes and the company was not run well. If it wasn't for the mega one hit wonder that was Sonic Sega would have been run out of the console business by Nintendo and turned Sega into a small time Arcade developer. And then they would have got wiped out by the death of arcades.

>>12077976
The major mistake were made by Sega of america not japan

Sega died because arcade style games died that's it

Dreamcast was easy to develop for,has a big Sonic,power full,cheap etc and it fail anyway

>>12078045
>The major mistake were made by Sega of america not japan
Sega Japan made plenty of mistakes.

>Dreamcast was easy to develop for,has a big Sonic,power full,cheap etc and it fail anyway
Yes but Dreamcast did not fail. It was selling at the same rate as Sega Genesis. But Sega Japan literally ran out of money. They couldn't even pay their employees. Sega Japan was around $800 million to $1 Billion dollars in debt.

>>12078074
>Sega Japan made plenty of mistakes.


Like what?

The Saturn architecture?
PS2 and N64 are harder yet it was a success

The real mistake that SOJ made was trusting SOA

>>12078078
>Like what?
Not doing what Sony and Nintendo did.

Big mistake.

>>12069551
so how do you explain SEGA's further decline over the past 20 years, while SoJ has been in total control?

>>12078084
?

Modern Sega have good finance

>>12078087
All I read is Fina nec

>>12078078
>Like what?
No sonic for saturn
Saturn shit at 3D
Arcade focus in a console world

>>12071232
>Of course, Sega had a console that could do 16 MILLION colors for sprites and backgrounds and 32,000 colors for textures and quads, but SoJ refused to make anything worthwhile for it.
enjoy ur Virtual Hydlide

>>12078093
>No sonic for saturn

There was a sonic for Saturn but once again SOA fuck up

>>12078087
>this company that was totally bought out by a pachinko company has good finance
?

>>12078101
>There was a sonic for Saturn
Nope SoJ said japan no like sonic we make arcade slop and bad ps1 ports!!! we will win!!!

>>12078087
>Modern Sega have good finance
Sega Japan had to sell off their arcade division. That's not good finance.

>>12072026
Yeah Sega was convinced they gained such a great foothold because they had the 16-bit system before Nintendo, so to continue taking the lead they needed to update their hardware more often. A stupid ploy and it exploited their fanbase while Nintendo stayed steady with quality games.

>>12078074
>Yes but Dreamcast did not fail. It was selling at the same rate as Sega Genesis.
They sold that bitch at a loss thanks to Bernie Stolar.

>>12078182
The drecast never came with 3 episodes of a magazine so there is that

>>12078182
Bernie Stolar finishes what Kalinske started

Killing Sega

>>12078182
>They sold that bitch at a loss thanks to Bernie Stolar.
All Sega consoles were sold for a loss. Why is this a complaint?

>>12078336
Which ones?

>Why is this a complaint?
Lol.

>>12078382
All Sega consoles were sold at a loss for the first several years of the console lifespan.

Nintendo is the only console company that sells their consoles for profit starting Day 1. Even if the profit is small, each Nintendo console sold makes money. Nintendo does this by using budget hardware.

>>12078434
I doubt any Nintendo console made money day 1. Maybe after they gave up and started making consoles a generation behind with the Wii onward.

>>12078434
Highly doubtful they were selling every console at a loss. Maybe the MD for a time? But the SG-1000 famously launched the same day as the Famicom at a higher price point.

>>12076673
Das roight!

>>12078434
I thought Sony started the sell at a loss trend.

>>12078472
Kalinske famously got into an argument with SoJ for selling the Genesis + Sonic bundle below the price of the separate items. SoJ relented after it turned out the bundle moved a lot of units.

>>12078535
>Genesis + Sonic bundle below the price of the separate items
That's the whole point of a bundle. You attract customers by offering to save money if they buy the bundle. I can't believe SoJ doesn't know this.

>SoJ relented after it turned out the bundle moved a lot of units.
SoJ were run by a bunch of nationalistic ADHD hardware engineers. Not businessmen.

The result is Sega constantly designing and releasing tons of new hardware without properly considering if they should make it.

Luckily they were saved by the arcade industry at the time which favored over the top arcade machines. They could a single machine like the Sega R360 for $90,000 each, and Super deluxe cabinets like Indy 500 for $150,000 each (Pic related).

>>12078045
>The major mistake were made by Sega of america not japan
As I've said in my previous posts, SoA only made about 35% of all the combined mistakes of Sega's entire console division.
Hardware-wise, the mistakes are: creating the Sega Activator and Sega VR (this one wasted a fair bit of money and time), hanging on to the Genesis beyond its usable lifespan, releasing the 32X and Nomad, and fighting against the Saturn past the point of rational discourse.
Software-wise, the mistakes are: hyper-fixation on FMVs, disdain for anime-style games (this is an annoyingly common theme with US execs in several companies not called Nintendo), shovelware padding, and ultimately alienating EA (this was another big one).

SoJ's mistakes are: releasing a gimped SMS in the West, fucking up its British launch, ruining Mega Drive's long-term viability through excessive cost-cutting (this would ultimately have severe consequences), releasing a CD "add-on" (more like 2 thirds of an entire second console) that was very expensive and considerably limited in real-world performance (because of said MD cost-cutting), releasing the Game Gear, the Samsung SVP debacle, foisting the Sega Pico on the Western branches, thoroughly fucking up the Saturn's hardware and US launch, and refusing to create Saturn titles based on long-running established IPs, including their Western flagship mascot. I'm not counting the large sums of money wasted on amusement parks (both in Japan and the West), because those weren't directly linked to the home console division (even though they sapped the funds of the overarching corporation).

>>12078645
>releasing a gimped SMS in the West

Again, the Master System was not”gimped” in the West, it was released with the same capabilities as the Mark III. The Japanese model with FM sound, turbo, and 3D Glasses adapter built in was released as a deluxe model in Japan a year after the Master System’s international release.

>>12078661
But the YM2413 was already available for the Mk III as an add-on module. They could've just internalized it for the international SMS (like they did for the Japanese re-release), whithout adding the rest of the Japanese SMS stuff (RapidFire, SegaScope).

>>12078692
According to all online sources, the add on wasn’t released in Japan until 1987, after the SMS was released internationally.

>>12078715
Well, I stand corrected. I was under the impression that the Mk III FM module preceded the SMS.

>>12078078
>Like what?
Like opening so many Sega theme parks in Japan that costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

>The Saturn architecture?
That too. Nobody liked the Saturn architecture. Not even Sega Employees

>>12078645
>ultimately alienating EA (this was another big one).
This one is on Sega Japan. EA, and other Western studios, said repeatedly that they did not like the Saturn's architecture or design. They wanted something simple. No dual CPU design.

>fighting against the Saturn past the point of rational discourse.
Nobody liked the Saturn architecture. Especially western developers. And Sega America was right. Saturn sold like garbage in the West. Including in Europe too.

>I'm not counting the large sums of money wasted on amusement parks
Nope. It counts. Especially since they cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And Sega was only a $3 billion dollar company at their peak.

>>12079229
>This one is on Sega Japan. EA, and other Western studios, said repeatedly that they did not like the Saturn's architecture or design. They wanted something simple. No dual CPU design.

???

What are you talking about it has nothing to do about EA not making games for the Dreamcast+ EA was probably the biggest supporter of the Saturn in the west they released numerous games on the Saturn

>>12079237
>EA was probably the biggest supporter of the Saturn in the west they released numerous games on the Saturn
Lmao. They hated the Saturn design and supported the Playstation way more.

>>12078645
I have to disagree with your analysis. I'll tell you why. The problem is that you are treating SoJ like another ordinary branch of Sega. They are not. They are the headquarters of Sega and the prime decision makers for everything. So SoJ has a much greater responsibility as the leader.

You can't say, "I'm not gonna count SoJ wasting 1 billion dollars on building theme parks because that's not related to consoles."

SoJ is absolutely responsible. They get all profits from other Sega branches' sales, and use that money how they see fit. If SoJ wastes that money on making Saturn a bloated mess or building unnecessary giant theme parks, then that's on them. All of it. It shows poor decision making on their part.

>>12069278 (OP)
At least link to Pandamonium's video, Tom.

>>12079281
It was never about the design. EA didn't like that Sega had their own sports line-up that competed with them

>>12069314
>Sega of America is the only reason Sega lived at all
never happened
>>12069287
>Bernie won
he's dead.

>>12079742
That was after.

>>12079229
>Nope. It counts. Especially since they cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And Sega was only a $3 billion dollar company at their peak.
>>12079604
>The problem is that you are treating SoJ like another ordinary branch of Sega. They are not. They are the headquarters of Sega and the prime decision makers for everything.
>If SoJ wastes that money on making Saturn a bloated mess or building unnecessary giant theme parks, then that's on them.
Fair enough, you're right. As the final decision maker, any money wasted by HQ impacts the budgets of all other branches. And they wasted more money than all the other branches combined.

>>12079927
>As the final decision maker, any money wasted by HQ impacts the budgets of all other branches. And they wasted more money than all the other branches combined.

Different anon here. This reminds me of a gaming history book I read a long time ago. They were interviewing retired 1990s Executives from various gaming companies in Japan. Several of them said they were shocked at how much Sega of Japan was spending, and how much they were willing to go into debt to try win the gaming war.

For example, If Namco built a theme park, then Sega would build their own theme park and make it twice as big. If SNK opened an arcade, then Sega would open another arcade nearby in a much bigger building with much arcade machines. Sega would make their arcades the size of a hotel or large casino. No expense was spared.

All these arcades are gone now. Closed long ago during the 2000s, and lost to history. But during Sega of Japan's peak? Sega of Japan was relentless like that during their prime years. It was an unseen Japanese gaming war we never heard about as Westerners. Sega of Japan spent money like a thirsty man chugs water.

>>12079992
It was a good choice at the time,the arcade division of Sega was much more profitable than the console division (thanks to SOA horrible spending)

>Sega president Hayao Nakayama announced at the beginning of the year, “We are planning to increase our arcade game division by a factor of three to a revenue scale of ¥350 billion.” The plan is to greatly increase the relatively stable income of the arcade division in order to absorb the risk of the home console division.

>By cleansing itself through the extraordinary loss, Sega’s overseas console division will be starting over from zero. Sega’s policy now is to focus on establishing the Saturn, and also on expanding into PC game software in the North American market. “The question now is how much our profits from the arcade market will be able to turn around the console market,” said Nakayama, whose words will be put to the test this year.

>>12080003
>SOA horrible spending
As opposed to SoJ's console division relative frugality, due to not actually earning any fucking money, from their distant 3rd place behind Nintendo and NEC?

>>12080016
It's actually hilarious because Sega of Japan's console division earned no money and was completely funded by SoA's and SoE's profits. It was basically a welfare system for SoJ. Just based on SoJ's console sales, there was absolutely no way SoJ's console department alone could have the budget to spend so lavishly on the Sega Saturn. Stuff like a brand new board design, multiple brand new Hitachi chips, multiple CPUs per board, etc etc.

In the past, Sega of Japan's console division was at least conservative when it came to their previous consoles. The Sega Sg-1000, Sega Master System, and Sega Mega Drive were all based on previously released arcade hardware. Except the hardware was downgraded and made cheaper for consoles. This allowed Sega of Japan to be practical and save costs for their console releases. It also made console ports easier and cheaper to do. I don't know what happened with the Saturn's design. All common sense went out the window with that console. SoJ didn't downscale arcade hardware like before. They went with expensive brand new custom designs for the console. It was a massive expense. I want to slap the Sega engineer who was responsible for this nonsense.

>>12080053
>All common sense went out the window with that console.
I think it was caused by a combo of not knowing what they actually wanted from a Genesis successor, combined with strongly desiring to get rid of the Genesis, because domestic sales vigorously sucked ass (see my previous post with the sales table) throughout its entire lifespan.
Plus a heavy heaping of chauvinism: they absolutely refused to consider starting from a Western design. The 3DO blueprint was right there from 1991, all they needed to do was replace the 12.5 MHz ARM CPU with a 25 MHz Motorola 68030 (to maintain the 68k coding knowledge base and not have to start from scratch), redo the system logic to account for the switch from RISC to CISC, streamline some stuff (ex. controller, savegame memory and manager), do a bit of minor cost-cutting (remove Video CD module and functionality) and launch it in early-mid 1993 for a not-insane price. If Hawkins didn't budge at first, they could just offer him something like 5 million dollars for the design (the offer he couldn't refuse I've mentioned earlier). Launching it for $399 would've been absolutely doable (the Goldstar version of the OG 3DO did it), and it would've compared favorably to the price for the OG Sega CD+Genesis combo, while being far more powerful.
Of course, this presupposes they don't get distracted by the Sega CD misadventure.

Playstation ruined videogames forever.

>>12080108
>Launching it for $399 would've been absolutely doable
Imo...That's just too expensive for a mass produced console intended for kids and families. Especially with 1990s money. Parents and kids would have save up for an entire year and kids ask for it as a Birthday or Christmas present.

The sweet spot is $249.99 . Maybe $299.99 max. But it better come with a game bundled with it. .

>>12069343
That’s not true, they were the most exciting company innovating in the home console space.

>>12080135
$299 would've likely still been doable with some haggling and the aforementioned (light) cost-cutting. A not-insignificant part of the OG 3DO budget went into the ARM60 CPU, which was brand new at the time (released 1992). By contrast, the 68030 in my alt-hist version of the Sega (let's call it) Mars was 6 years old in 1993, and Motorola had shifted focus to the 68040 (released 1990), so a definite potential for savings.
I would pull a sneaky bastard and bundle it with some sort of DOS port which would play better with a mouse (maybe the talkie version of Lands of Lore 1, make use of that CD space for Patrick Stewart's voice), and a mail-in $25(+/-) rebate in the box, usable for the purchase of a mouse+save cart pack.

>>12080168
Fake edited to add: the mail-in rebate would also be in-store redeemable.

>>12080108
How much would this cost compared to Sega adapting the Sega Model 1 (arcade board that came out in 1992, but was designed in late 1991) for Saturn?

>>12079742
Didn't Sony also have their own sports games?

>>12069605
Japanese games that sold well in the west.

>>12080204
Problem with Sega's 3D arcade boards is that they were very "deep and wide". They had several individual boards, with a massive amount of custom chips. See picrel, that's the Model 1 hardware. You would have to blob shit together, and cut bits off, which risks ending up badly (the Genesis, itself originating from the System 16 board, was a victim of cutting too much shit off).
By contrast, the 3DO hardware was extremely simple: 1x CPU, 1x GPU, 1x multifunctional DSP.

>>12069314
This is actually false if you think about it.
Sega would probably never have been near bankrupcy if not for the fact they wasted so much money trying to compete in the console market.

>>12069421
Extra stock of a few thounds of units is the requirement, what SoA did was a shot in the foot.

>>12080226
They would've run face first into the arcade fatigue wall while trying to sell their $150k+ cabinets. Also, if you want to talk about waste, their underperforming amusement parks take the top three positions.

>>12080243
Wasn't holding reserve stock percentage-based, rather than raw quantity?

>>12069617
>>12069745
>>12069752
>>12069765
Tbf, the Saturn idea showcased to Tom in 92 was completely different than what we got and not only that but he didn't even want Sega to have a next console until 96-97.

>>12080276
>he didn't even want Sega to have a next console until 96-97.
Tbf...Kalinske was right. Nintendo waited to 1996 and sold around 40 million Nintendo 64 units. Sony PS1 didn't even really hit their peak until 2 years after launch around 1997.

So a 1996 launch for Sega Saturn was entirely possible. Sega needed more time to really get the 3D hardware down. And more time to develop launch games.

>>12071489
>>12071505
>>12071530
Knowing SoA, they would make something still using the genesis as base for retro compatibility and cut costs, which would end up underpowered and mogged by the ps1 anyway.

>>12080205
Not football.

>>12080293
You fail to consider that Nintendo has many more mass appealing IPs than Sega, so they'd lose anyway.

>>12080334
>You fail to consider that Nintendo has many more mass appealing IPs than Sega, so they'd lose anyway.
I dunno about that.

Sega has some heavy hitters too to counter Nintendo. Sonic, Knuckles, Tails, and the rest of Sonic cast and their games counters Mario and his friends.

There's also Golden Axe, Shinobi, Streets of Rage, Phantasy Star, Ecco the Dolphin, and more.

I'm sure Sega could put up a good fight against Nintendo.

>>12080293
Yeah let PS1 a 2 years advantage while our 16 bits software don't sell at all...

They should have released the Saturn in 1994 in North America that would have been the better for Sega

>>12072026
Retard
>and every developer was pissed at Sega because the Saturn devkits either did not exist or did not work (there are interviews with the devs of Sim City and Virtua Racing - they were allowed to code on Saturn devkits for like half a day every week, by visiting Sega offices)
Lying retard. Both of those devs said the kits were just huge and unwieldy, allowing only to debug on processor at a time, and came with poor documentation. Those were the problems.
>and oh the console also couldn't do proper 3D.
Shut up nigger, it did.

>>12069717
>Have read ANY interview with Sega America staff, read Tom Kalinske's book, read Tom Kalinske interviews, or even read 3rd party books written by gaming historians who interviewed former Sega employees?
Nigger, are you actually referring to that failed screenplay bullshit Console Wars as a source?

>>12076614
>The Sega CD was actually a modest success for Sega and wound up turning a profit until it's discontinuation.
A lot of things "turned a profit" in this era simply because it was the golden age of home gaming consoles. People bought shit in HUGE numbers. The problem was that most of it wasn't any fucking good, the Sega CD included, so it soured consumer perceptions of these products, which is why the 32x failed, and why nobody wanted a fucking Saturn or a Dreamcast.

It's insane to me how all of this retrospective marketing jabber fails to consider that consumers were sentient humans capable of forming opinions on things. And they formed a lot of negative opinions about Sega's products, because they were fucking garbage compared to Nintendo and Sony, especially by the mid-90s.

>>12070378
>Lack of killer apps from both SoA and SoJ killed the console
>SoJ
Japan certainly had enough killer apps to outsell the N64 in their home country.

>>12078434
>Nintendo is the only console company that sells their consoles for profit starting Day 1. Even if the profit is small, each Nintendo console sold makes money.
This is the single most retarded thing ever posted.

>>12080420
>There's also Golden Axe, Shinobi, Streets of Rage, Phantasy Star, Ecco the Dolphin, and more.
You cannot look at me straight in the eye and tell me those hold a candle to Nintendo's other ips.
I don't even care about them but i know most of the world care way more about what tendo puts out compared to those ips.

>>12080587
Only because they those have been around a lot longer and thus more iconic. So many of Sega’s IP’s scratch an itch none of Nintendo’s did; more of Sega’s IP’s could’ve reached those levels of popularity and recognition if they had been utilized right.

>>12080592
Look up the top 10 most sold genesis games, it's all sports and licensed games with Sonic inbetween.
Sega could NOT keep a console alive with 1st party games alone like Nintendo did.

>>12080481
Being first ===///=== Being best

>>12080481
With what fucking games???

control + f
>fifa
0 results
>pro evolution
0 results
>sports
15 results and not all of them in a proper way

No surprise, you most of /vr/ anons, didn't understand how videogame market worked in the 90s and in the 2000s

Speaking of sega fiscal year report from 1996, that thread was really good it really showd that even sega call it psx in a sega official document.

And that north américa sega sports divisioni BLOWN all the money.

>>12080604
Nintendo 64 got a bunch of 3rd party sports games. You have no idea what you are talking about.

What videogame IPs did Sony have in 1994

>>12071489
>Partnered with Western companies in America to keep costs down and provide parts. Keep it basic wirh a single controller packed in, and launch it in America for $249.99

no chip fab or optical production happened in the US, there was no opportunity for this option to equate to cost savings.

>>12072095
>I don't think this would have prevented third-parties from jumping over the PS1 through deals with Snoy and their ease of/cheaper development/manufacturing and promotion. You also kill western games from being released in Japan and viceversa by essentially having two different consoles to develop for and with entirely different hardware specs.

cross pollination back to Japan is essentially meaningless in hindsight. The first part though would have been the deciding factor. The lack of Sony's big name, and the hindsight of how shitty developer support was as a company policy at Sega would mean jumping ship for the PSX no matter how its sliced.

>>12081734
>no chip fab or optical production happened in the US, there was no opportunity for this option to equate to cost savings.
Why would you tell blatant lies like this?

>>12081734
There was at least 6 to 12 different companies manufacturing computer chips in the USA during the 1990s. That includes Intel, AMD, IBM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and several others. Your information is just wrong.

>>12081454
Square was butthurtbabout cartridge costs and hated nintendo and jumped on immediately

>>12081396
The Saturn also got 3rd party support, point being?

>>12081454
Sony didn't need those because their console was the best to make for and sold the most.

>>12081454
Sony didn't need video game IPs in 1994.
They had development hardware that was both well-documented and easy to use and that was all they needed to succeed.

Joke's on all of you, I like underdog systems and don't care if they were financially successful. Financially successful games don't appeal to core gamers.

The PlayStation killed SEGA and almost killed Nintendo, damn.

>>12081454
All of them, because they bought the exclusivity .

>>12080748
Technically, the best-known incarnation of PES only became FIFA-big after Sega had already left the console market. International Superstar Soccer had managed to carve out a decent slice of the soccer pie, but it wasn't yet as famous as it would later become (under its new name).

>>12081912
okay fine. That was still the case for optical drives.

And it raised a question. If there were so many (competent) players in chip fab at the time in the US, why were they never utilized? You can't say because there was no demand, so whats left? Quality? Availability? no, likely it was cost. And at that point of order, the idea that partnering with western companies in America as >>12071489 indicated would keeps costs down is still nonsense.

>>12082173
Are you serious? Sony bought up exclusivity left and right for PS1. It's how they succeeded in the business. They throw money at publishers to only put shit on PS1/2/3/4 and 5 to this day

>>12084141
Nintendo and Sony did partner with American chip manufacturers for the N64 and Playstation 1. They have American chips powering them.

However Sega did not. In fact, Sega resisted the idea harshly for some reason...despite several companies attempting a partnership. I think Sega (or at the Japanese console division) was run by nationalists who hated the idea of admitting that American chips were cheaper or better than Japanese chips.

>>12084285
>I think Sega (or at the Japanese console division) was run by nationalists who hated the idea of admitting that American chips were cheaper or better than Japanese chips.
it's likely that CSK, sega's parent corp at the time, simply put japanese interests first due to their cosy relationships with all of the big chip makers and engineering firms in japan.

>>12084454
But why did they autistically stick with Hitachi? I understand why Sharp and Ricoh weren't in the cards (Nintendo suppliers), but you had the likes of Fujitsu, Toshiba and Matsushita.

>>12084487
I forgot how but some anons mentioned before that, at the time, Sega CEO was somehow related to Hitachi's CEO. Hitachi was the distant nephew of Sega's CEO. Or they maybe they were former classmates? I can't remember which exactly. Other anons have mentioned it before. But Hitachi's chip business was actually on the verge of bankruptcy. No Japanese companies wanted to buy Hitachi chips which had zero history of making CPUs. So Hitachi CEO used his connections and begged Sega CEO for help.


So they agreed and Sega of Japan signed an exclusive agree with Hitachi to supply all Sega CPU chips for 5 years, and Hitachi would sell Sega the chips at a discount. This saved Hitachi's chip business. It also explains why they forced Tom Kalinske to use Hitachi chips for the Sega 32x.

Tom Kalinske wanted to try using American chip makers to save costs, and explore the idea of putting GPU acceleration into the 32x. But Sega of Japan shut that idea down hard and forced Sega America to use Hitachi chips.

>>12084509
I guess Sega could have use ATI but their early 3d graphics cards weren't great. But it's definitely better than just using 2 Hitachi CPUs slapped together like that 32x did.

>>12084285
>Nintendo and Sony did partner with American chip manufacturers for the N64 and Playstation 1. They have American chips powering them.

curious. what components were made in the US? can they be identified?

>>12084509
>No Japanese companies wanted to buy Hitachi chips which had zero history of making CPUs
that's fucking nonsense. hitachi had long history of licensed development of 6809, 6502, z80, 68000 etc.etc. and created the super-h series that was used in a shitload of arcades and computers.

>>12084487
they already had a business relationship going back decades. similar reason why yamaha was the number one source for all of their audio shit.

>>12086170
>licensed development
Yeah...this is called "paying to use the chip designs of other companies".

>created the super-h series that was used in a shitload of arcades and computers.
1. They were only used is Sega arcade machines.

2. If you read any interviews, then you would know that before Sega bought the Super H chips, Hitachi had zero chip sales. Sega buying the Super H series literally saved Hitachi's chip company. Only after Sega purchased the Super H did a handful of other companies purchase the Super H chip too. But it wasn't a lot. Sega still purchased the bulk of Super H chips.

3. Once Sega nearly declared bankruptcy and left the hardware business, Hitachi couldn't find new customers and eventually shut down their chip division.

>>12072924
>PS1 didn't have any western games,

Twisted Metal
Warhawk
Crash Bandicoot
Jet Moto
Syphon Filter
Rally Cross
Spyro
NFL Gameday
2 XTreme
MLB series
Blasto
989 Studios

The PS1 was loaded with western made games when it launched in North America in 1995. Sony had more support from western studios than they did from the Japanese studios early on. Sega of America was producing quite a few games for the Genesis in the west, but they struggled with the Sega Saturn. They published Ghen War and Congo, but those were developed by external studios. There are also the Bug! games, and a few others. Of course STI was developing Sonic Xtreme, until it broke the studio. They also co-developed Die Hard Arcade.

>>12069516
>End of 1997 ,the Saturn was completely dead

Christmas/ Holiday season 1996 was the death blow to the Saturn in North America. PSX sales were reaching record highs by black Friday 1996 and the N64 launched during that season.

>>12069797
>+Mario world and Sonic 1 are the best selling games of that generation

Mario World was a day one pack-in game for the SNES. The majority of copies sold came from the pack-in sales. Other popular SNES pack-in games were Super Mario Allstars/ Allstars + Super Mario World, and the original Donkey Kong Country. Sonic the Hedgehog also replaced Altered Beast as the pack-in game for the Genesis, which gave it a huge sales boost. Sonic 2 was also a pack-in game too, but less common.

>>12086189
>similar reason why yamaha was the number one source for all of their audio shit.
That one's not surprising. Yamaha was one of the largest audio hardware companies in the world. Yamaha, Roland, and Korg were the Japanese electronic music holy trinity.

>>12086343
>Sonic 2 was also a pack-in game too, but less common.
My Mega Drive Model 2 came with Sonic 2 as a pack-in.

>>12085438
>curious. what components were made in the US? can they be identified?
Not sure about the N64. But for the PS1, the ram chips were made in the USA by Micron technologies. The CD-Rom drive of the PS1 was also made in San Diego. Some of the smaller chips were made by Texas Instruments in Texas. The main cpu processor was an American design, but I don't know where it was manufactured. Although I suspect it was partly manufactured in the USA and possibly other factories to meet world demand. The lower level components like the capacitors and resistors were US made. Final Assembly and putting it all together was also done in the USA (at least for some batches of PS1s destined for the Western market).

>>12086265
>1. They were only used is Sega arcade machines.
that's false
https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=868

>If you read any interviews
you claim they had "zero history of making cpus". they made cpus, and a lot of the fucking things. no amount of mental retard gymnastics changes anything. jesus fucking christ help us all.

>>12082173
Yeah, Saturn's dev system was a suicide for smaller companies
https://www.retroreversing.com/sega-saturn-programming-box/
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/68876/sega-saturn-devkits-cost-77-000-back-1995/

>>12086626
>N64 devkit
>$25,000

I thought one was a million dollars? That's what I've read in interviews over the years.

>>12086651
Nah, not a million. The thing with N64 was that you developed on SGI which is quoted as 25k, but you would need one of those for each programmer and 3D artist. They later released compiler for PC, but N64 game sources I've seen were for Indys.
Saturn 77k list is somewhat redundant, I'd say it would have been closer to 30-40k, but you'd add SGI for 3D artist to that, which would bump it back up to ~70k.
PSX dev hardware was by far the cheapest. From Edge Issue 20:
>Perhaps the most ingenious move on Sony’s part was its decision to use the PC as a development platform, enabling it to call on the skills of a huge number of developers. Licensees now receive a pair of full-length ISA cards that plug into a normal PC. These two cards contain the entire PlayStation chipset, as well as extra RAM and some logic to enable them to talk to the PC.
>PlayStation developers need to cough up £12,000 for the full system (which Sony is adamant it doesn’t make money on), although all subsequent software tools and hardware upgrades are free.
>But the decision to embrace the PC as a development platform has wider ramifications. Rather than promote a PlayStation-only development path, Sony has seen the advantage of capitalising on the crossover of product between the two platforms. The vast majority of non-Japanese developers are focusing on both formats.
>In Japan, Sony had been preparing to use its own Sony News workstations for PS-X development — these were expensive MIPS R4000-based machines that could be connected to the prototype PS-X box. But the thought of using expensive Japanese workstations was abhorrent to a PC-friendly developer like Psygnosis, so SN Systems were given the chance to create something around the PC.
>Fortunately, Sony liked what it saw. A few weeks later SN received notification that Sony had decided to abandon its plans for an exclusively workstation-based development system and had opted for PC approach instead.

>>12086972
>PSX dev hardware was by far the cheapest.
Cumulatively, it was de facto less than half the cost of developing for competing systems, and it showed where ti mattered most.

People usually forgot that thrid party games usually took several months to get to sega saturn, that was the REAL blow to sega saturn.

Imagine having to wait FIVE months to play FIFA 97 (even though is one of the good ones). That really hurt sega saturn sales at least here in Europe.

>>12086651
costs to develop software for n64 were dramatically smashed down to a tiny fraction of the cost when the Doctor V64 was released. you could use any computer to send data to the n64 and the device only cost a few hundred US$.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64?useskin=vector
these were used by a lot of developers.

>>12080208
that's fucking hilarious. I could fill a bookstore

>>12086497
>My Mega Drive Model 2 came with Sonic 2 as a pack-in

Same here.

Why is this thread still up? Hasn't it hit the bump limit already? So many other threads have fallen into the archive since yesterday.

Are mods keep it alive?

>>12069314
/thread

>>12088549
>>12086972
>>12086651
So why did the N64 never recover in terms of game development despite lowering prices?

>>12093165
Because devkit cost is only one aspect. The N64 had a bunch of other drawbacks. Including, but not restricted to, its storage medium, which was both size-limited and expensive (because Nintendo wanted to double-dip, asking royalties both for the game and cartridge itself).

>>12092296
OP is autistic and keeps making threads about SoJ vs SoA (he hates SoA) and he bumps them to limit.

Expect another thread in a month.

>>12093165
nintendo's licensing terms were the biggest factor. they were outrageous. wasn't profitable for game developers.